Promoting vocabulary development in kindergartners: the influence of storytelling

Abstract

Over the years, many studies have been shown that storytelling plays a significant role in vocabulary acquisition (Speaker, Taylor, & Kamen, 2004). My research focused on vocabulary development in native and bilingual English speaking kindergartners through storytelling. Findings from this study of storytelling that revealed a positive relationship between the number of occurrences to words in the story and the vocabulary development as well as the positive relationship between the numbers of exposures to the storybooks and the vocabulary development are presented. Findings also confirmed that older kindergartners acquired more new vocabulary compared with the younger group kindergartners. The kindergartners who were all non readers listened to stories over a two week period by a professional storyteller. The kindergartners listened to the first story only once in the first week and completed a multiple-choice vocabulary posttest immediately thereafter. This test included 5 unfamiliar words from the story. The second storybook was read twice in the following week, two days apart and a multiple-choice vocabulary posttest with a different set of 5 unfamiliar words was presented after the second time the story was read. Three weeks after this, a delayed posttest with the 10 words were administered. There were 10 target words throughout the 2 stories. Only one target word appeared in both stories, once in Story 1 and twice in Story 2. Likewise, 4 target words appeared once in Story 1 and the other set of 4 target words appeared once in Story 2. There was 1 target word (not heard word) which had not read to the kindergartners in each of the story. As expected, the scores on the second multiple-choice vocabulary posttest was higher than the first multiple-choice vocabulary posttest because children vocabulary acquisition increased with the numbers of the exposures to story and the number of occurrences to words in the story. Nevertheless, storytelling would have no benefits on children’s vocabulary acquisition if words were not being delivered or told to the children, whereas the number of occurrences of the story read increased. Findings in the present study proved that reading the same story at least twice and more exposures to words contributed the positive influence to kindergartners’ vocabulary growth.