NARRATION AND STORYTELLING: THEORETHICAL CONTEXT

Why reading is important for babies and young children

Sharing stories, talking and singing every day helps your child’s development in lots of ways. 

Reading and sharing stories can:

• help your child become familiar with sounds, words, language and the value of book
• spark your child’s imagination, stimulate curiosity and help his brain development
• help your child learn the difference between ‘real’ and ‘make-believe’
• help your child understand change and new or frightening events, and also the strong emotions that can go along with them
• help your child develop early literacy skills like the ability to listen to and understand words.

Sharing stories with your child doesn’t mean you have to read.

Just by looking at books with your child, you can be a great storyteller and a good model for using language and books. Your child will learn by watching you hold a book the right way and seeing how you move through the book by gently turning the pages.

Reading stories with children has benefits for grown-ups too. The special time you spend reading together promotes bonding and helps to build your relationship. This is important for your child’s developing social and communication skills

Storytelling is both an entertaining and an educational tool for children. While Picture Books has shown the capability for a computer system to generate children’s stories, it lacks the storytelling capability needed in order to narrate the story to young beginning readers (age 4-6). Stories that are narrated with emotion can improve the experience of these young listeners. This paper presents the development of a synthesized voice narrator capable of expressing emotions while narrating the children’s stories generated by the Picture Books system. Test results showed that the children were able to recognize the generated sound clips that reflect the emotions happy and sad, but had difficulty recognizing the emotions reflecting anger, fearand surprise.

Storytellers use various techniques, such as pauses, emphasis, repetition, transition, and exaggeration [4] to hold the attention of their young listeners as they bring the story world to life. The use of repetition is important especially when the audience comprise young children as they would be able to learn sentence patterns and new words, as well as retain the story in their heads. According to the narrative rehearsal hypothesis, the story will stay longer in memory as well as the emotions that go along with it if the story is repeated or rehearsed [5]. Exaggeration can be used to inject a form of humor, and possibly stimulate the imaginations of the listeners. The pauses could show a form of emphasis, or build up the suspense in the upcoming scene.
Storytellers can manipulate their voices to show the emotions of the characters they are acting out in the story. Emotions help draw out the mood and feeling of the sto- ry, enabling children to understand the story. For example, the storyteller may pretend to cry or whimper while narrating to show that the character or the scene in particular is sad. If the character that was sad is a young girl, the storyteller would raise the pitch in his/her voice and speak with energy, since the character he/she is portraying


I'm going to link here a page where its explained why is storytelling important to children. Really good article!: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zyvhpv4


REFERENCES:
http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/reading.html 

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-4-431-54106-6_1