A Systematic Literature Review: The Modalities, Pedagogies, Benefits, and Implications of Storytelling Approaches in Early Childhood Education Classroom
Abstract
Abstract
The purpose of this systematic literature review was to investigate and synthesize several aspects of storytelling in the reviewed scholarly research, providing a holistic summary and potential insights for early childhood educators. The study asked: (1) What are the various forms, modes and media, and involved pedagogies that storytelling in early childhood education can take? (2) What are the reported benefits of storytelling in early childhood education? (3) Based on the literature, what understandings and pedagogical implications are enriched for early childhood educators to utilize storytelling in their pedagogies? Using a theoretical framework based in multimodal literacy and sociocultural theory, data for the study were derived from 33 screened articles that had been published in the last 10 years. The findings showcase that educators use diverse storytelling approaches with multimodal ensembles in early childhood education, and storytelling was found to provide children a variety of different opportunities to make meaning of the world and express it. By being immersed in storytelling, children were documented in the literature as benefiting from considerable immediate and long-term effects. This study offers understandings of a diversity of forms of storytelling and instructional implications for engaging children through multimodal participation. Additionally, this study may provide baseline knowledge for teacher education to improve storytelling strategies and corresponding multimodal scaffolding feedback, which may provide insights into supporting young children’s storytelling experiences.