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Linguistics and Education 48 (2018) 52–60
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Linguistics and Education
journa l homepage: www.e lsev ier .com/ locate / l inged
nchantment in storytelling: Co-operation and participation inhildren’s aesthetic experience
sta Cekaitea,∗, Polly Björk-Willénb
Department of Child Studies, Linköping University, 581 83 Linköping, SwedenDepartment of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
r t i c l e i n f o
rticle history:eceived 2 February 2018eceived in revised form 22 August 2018ccepted 30 August 2018vailable online 19 October 2018
eywords:torytellingarly childhoodultimodality
ocial interactionffective stance
a b s t r a c t
In early childhood education, storytelling has traditionally been seen as a learning activity that lays thegroundwork for children’s vocabulary and literacy development. The present study uses video-recordedstorytelling events to examine young children’s emotional involvement and aesthetic experiences dur-ing adult storytelling in a regular Swedish preschool for 1- to 3.5-year-olds. By adopting a multimodalinteractional perspective on human sense-making, socialization, and literacy (Goodwin, 2017), it con-tributes to research examining multimodality in early childhood literacy (Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017). Theanalytical focus is on co-operation in aesthetic experience: the teachers’ ways of organizing an entertain-ing, affectively valorized and ‘enchanting’ storytelling, and the children audience’s verbal and nonverbalparticipation (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004).
The study shows that teachers used ‘lighthouse’ gaze, props, marked prosody and pauses to invitethe child audience to participate, join the attentive multiparty participation frameworks and share the
iteracy affective layering of story. The young children exploited the recognizability of the story and contributed byco-participating through bodily repetitions, choral completions, elaborating or volunteering anticipatorycontributions, and pre-empting the upcoming story segment. The study suggests that through adult-child co-operation, the embodied telling becomes a site for children’s affective and aesthetic literacysocialization.
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© 2018 The Authors. P. Introduction
In early childhood education, book reading and storytelling haveraditionally been seen as learning activities that lay the ground-ork for children’s literacy development (Collins, 2010; Heath, 1983;hitehurst et al., 1994). There is, however, another side of stories
written and oral narrative texts), that is, their potential to promotehildren’s socio-emotional learning and socialization. The aesthetic1
haracteristics and developmental advantages of stories, includingiterary fairy tales, have been the focus of various literary and psycho-ogical approaches (Bettelheim, 1976; Lubetsky, 1989). Bettelheimoregrounds “the uses of enchantment” in stories as significant forhildren’s development and exploration of their world and social
oncerns, noting thatFor a story truly to hold the child’s attention, it must entertain himand arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate
∗ Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A. Cekaite), [email protected]
P. Björk-Willén).1 Aesthetic experience is here defined in a colloquial way as an emotional response
hat arises towards works of art or other aesthetic objects, such as stories, or poetry.
ttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2018.08.005898-5898/© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article/).
hed by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-NDlicense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and to clarifyhis emotions; be attuned to his difficulties, while at the same timesuggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him. (p. 5)
Whereas pleasurable features, enchantment with the story asaesthetic experience and emotional involvement are highlighted asimportant characteristics of childhood literacy experience (e.g., sig-nificant for children’s self-identification as readers, Johnson, 2017;Poveda, 2003), the main bulk of the research has examined what tra-ditionally has been viewed as literacy-enhancing verbal acts (e.g.,adult questions, verbal expansions) and their uses during picturebook reading practices (Connor et al., 2006; Snow, 2004).
In the present study, we direct our focus at young children’semotional involvement and aesthetic experiences during adult sto-rytelling in a regular Swedish preschool for 1- to 5-year-olds. Tellingis defined here as reading aloud and enactment of a text with a narra-tive structure (fairy tales, other book stories) that is performed for anaudience of young children. The present study adopts a multimodalinteractional perspective on human sense making, including social-ization, learning, and literacy (Goodwin, 2017; Johnson, 2015, 2017).
It contributes to research examining multimodality in early child-hood literacy by adopting an expanded conceptualization of languageand aligning with a view on children’s involvement in literacy eventsas “meaningful and useful for themselves” in their daily life (Flewitt,under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.
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011; Johnson, 2015; Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017). The analytical focuss on the teachers’ ways of organizing an entertaining, engrossing,ffectively valorized storytelling event, and the child audience’s ver-al and nonverbal participation in the aesthetic activity.
The notion of “participation” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004: 224)dopted here views social life and social encounters as constitutedhrough participants’ actions that are essentially multimodal andmbodied: multiple participants build action together in embod-ed practices and by using diverse semiotic resources. Participationnvolves attentiveness and the social actors continuously taking onenother into account as well as mutually influencing the construc-ion of a common course of action within evolving structures of talkJohnson, 2017; Kyratzis, 2017: 8; see also Melander, 2012). Partic-pation and action are thus achieved “co-operatively”, through “therocess of building something new through decomposition and reuseith transformation of resources placed in a public environment by
nd earlier actor” (Goodwin, 2017: 7). Co-operation, i.e., a way inhich “we inhabit each others’ actions” can be seen as a generalechanism for accumulation and change in learning (ibid.).2
This view of participation and co-operation includes consider-ng the sequential organization of language practices, the embodiedarticipation frameworks, objects and fine-tuning of participants’ttention to these objects, public display of affective stances, asell as the broader, sociocultural features of the literacy prac-
ices (Johnson, 2015; Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017: 1). The role offfective stances – language-mediated and embodied resources –through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, posi-ion subjects (themselves and others) . . . with respect to any salientimension of the sociocultural field” (Du Bois, 2007: 163; Goodwin,ekaite, & Goodwin, 2012) is emphasized in that they clearly con-ribute to aligning participants into the co-operative organization ofcommon course of action. By adopting the multimodal interactionalerspective, the present study will analyze and discuss storytellings an interactionally accomplished and sociocultural poignant prac-ice, where young children can immerse themselves in early literacyy co-operating in aesthetic experiences and affective evaluation oftory characters and events.
.1. Early literacy and children’s contribution to literacy activities
Storytelling and book reading have primarily been seen as activi-ies that can enhance children’s literacy development. For instance, aealth of research – taking psychological, linguistic, and educationalerspectives – has shown that the literacy environment in earlyhildhood contributes to children’s emergent literacy developmentDyson, 1991; Genishi & Dyson, 2009; Guo et al., 2012). A growingumber of studies have examined how adults/caregivers, during pic-ure book reading, use questions, vocabulary explanations and othererbal methods to engage children in literacy training (Heath, 1983;arková, 2016). Notably, literacy is not limited to written language.
t also includes abilities to structure textually cohesive and coher-nt stretches of spoken discourse (Blum-Kulka & Snow, 2004; Snow,004). Children’s book stories, and their language features, can be
ncorporated into children’s play and have the potential to foster dis-ursive literacy skills (Vardi-Rath, Teubal, Aillenberg, & Lewin, 2014).hildren’s peer interactions have also been recognized as compris-
ng simple narratives in pretend play (Björk-Willén, forthcoming;yratzis, 2014).
A broad definition of early literacy views it as a process of meaningaking, “through the multiplicity of modalities in social events, that
akes place here and now rather than constituting a stage on a path to
ome future literal stage” (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Gee, 2008; GillenHall, 2013: 14; Kress, 1997). For instance, Poveda (2003) shows thathildren’s participation in classroom reading of fairy tales constitutedart of language socialization, and ultimately, incidental learning and
2 The hyphen in “co-operation” emphasizes the importance of performing opera-ions with transformations on materials provided by another, i.e., the “combinatorialrganization” of human actions (Goodwin, 2017: 6).
and Education 48 (2018) 52–60 53
socialization through literature to literature (see also Sterponi, 2007on ‘clandestine’ reading and literacy). Several recent studies haveadopted a multimodal interactional perspective on literacy eventsand examined embodied participation frameworks, objects, graphictexts/pictures, and bodily alignment as meaning-making resources inchildren’s reading practices. For example, Moore (2017) and de Leon(2017) demonstrate that children’s participation in literacy practiceswas guided by adults through their use of directives that monitorand re-calibrate children’s attention. As shown by Kyratzis (2017),young children skilfully used multimodal actions to achieve a play-ful performance of ‘reading a picture book’ (see also Cekaite andBjörk-Willen, 2013), and in this way contributed to their own liter-acy socialization. In a study of primary school peer literacy activities,Johnson (2015, 2017) shows that collaborative reading was depen-dent on children’s mutual coordination of multimodal participationframeworks. Notably, the study demonstrates that literacy acquisi-tion was intimately related to the children’s affective stances anddevelopment of identities as avid readers who enjoy the readingprocess.
1.2. Aesthetics, pleasure and performance in storytelling
As suggested above, stories, both literary and oral, are not“designed for utilitarian purposes to inform” (Pratt, 1977). Rather,both literary and oral narratives are designed “to elaborately displayhighly tellable circumstances and incidents in such a way that theaddressee will respond effectively in the intended way, adopt theintended evaluation and interpretation, take pleasure in doing so”.Similarly, interactional approaches have highlighted that the ways inwhich stories are told provide information about “how human beingsorganize their experience of the events they encounter in the world”(Bruner, 1990; Goodwin, 1990: 236). They are morally and affectivelycharged, and in this way help the participants, speakers and listen-ers, to make sense of the events in the world and themselves (Ochs& Capps, 2001). Moreover, storytelling is a dialogic event and per-formance, in which listeners, i.e., the audience, actively contributeto the dynamic process of telling (Goodwin, 1990, see also Duranti,1986). Performance is choreographed through speakers’ use of talkand nonverbal resources to animate story characters and the reac-tions to them. It brings alive a vernacular theatrical performance andengages the audience (Goffman, 1981).
In the present analysis of teacher-child storytelling, we direct ourattention to how the telling (narrative performance) is accomplishedthrough the carefully coordinated actions of multiple participants.We will explore in detail how the adults and young childrendraw upon a range of modalities – such as voice, intonation, facialexpressions, gaze and gestures – in their aesthetic and affectiveenactment of the storytelling. The analysis highlights the ways inwhich “enchanting” telling and aesthetic experience involve atten-tive listening, and co-operation – sharing of – affective stances amongadults and children.
2. Method
2.1. Data and analytical procedure
The present study was conducted in a public Swedish preschoolfor 1- to 5-year-old children.3
In Sweden, public preschools, which are attended by approxi-mately 95% of children, constitute the main early childhood setting
work and at the same time educate children. Their aims and workmethods are defined by the Swedish National Curriculum that fore-grounds a holistic approach to child development, learning, and
3 The study is part of a larger project on children’s emotion socialization, PI A.Cekaite. Financial support from Swedish Research Council is gratefully acknowl-edged.
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4 A. Cekaite, P. Björk-Willén / Linguistics and Education 48 (2018) 52–60
motional well-being. The present preschool was located in a sub-rban middle-class area in a middle-sized Swedish town. The dataonsist of 20 h of video-ethnography (recordings, observations andnterviews with staff) conducted during a period of 1.5 years.4 Thirtyhildren and five educators participated in the study. In many ofhe preschool activities (e.g., free-play, circle-time) the mixed-ageroup of children participated together. During instructional activi-ies (e.g., story-telling) children were divided into more age-coherentroups and the activities were adapted to the children’s knowledgend developmental level. Storytelling events were performed on aaily basis and usually took place in a cosy, comfortable preschoolpace (a sofa or soft corner) with a small (three to five) or largereight to ten) group of children. Storytelling activities had multipleoals: they provided literacy training and created a cosy and restfulime. Many of stories (e.g. fairytales) were frequently repeated andere well-known to the children.
.2. Analytical procedure
The analysis began with the repeated viewing of the video-ecorded data. The initial indexing of video-recorded activitiesndicated that storytelling situations were entertaining and dynamicocial encounters characterized by teachers’ verbal and elabo-ate embodied methods for engaging the child audience. We haveelected and analyzed 10 video-recorded storytelling events (teach-rs’ reading, telling and enacting of fairy tales or other storieso children) for various age groups of children. The storytellingvents were transcribed and embodied actions noted. We specificallyocused on the teachers’ and children’s affective stances and engage-
ent with the story. Situations where the participants’ affectivetances were prominent were selected for further analysis (con-ucted through repeated viewing). The analysis was inspired by aonversation analytic approach (CA) analyzing naturally occurringractices. Our focus was on multimodal – verbal and embodied –esources that participants use to act and make sense of each other’smbodied actions in a sequential context of emergent activities. Thisnalytical perspective adopts Goodwins’ framework of participation2004) and contextual configurations (Goodwin, 2000) in examin-ng how participants invoke and deploy various semiotic modalitiesnd build alignments with each other in a specific social situation.he transcriptions are informed by conversation analysis (Jefferson,984, see “Transcription conventions” in Appendix).
Fig. 1.
The categorization of affective stances was based on previousresearch (e.g., Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004; Goodwin et al., 2012),and was refined during analysis in relation to the embodied con-duct of the participants, the goals and affordances of the educationalactivity. The categories evolved inductively and the participants’affective stances were categorized according to their main commu-nicative functions, and embodied characteristics. The analyses werediscussed at local and international seminars. Repeated data sessionsand discussions within a research group, in addition to methodologi-cal workshops contributed to discerning robust findings. The extractshere are selected from three representative activities to illustrate thekey phenomena characterizing the affective and multimodal organi-zation of storytelling. They involve three narrative situations: (1) theteacher’s enactment of The Three Billy Goats Gruff (by using toy props:a bridge, three goats, a troll and grass) for four toddlers (1.2- to 1.5-year-olds) (Fig. 1); (2, 3) The teacher’s reading of Little Red Riding Hoodand A Bad Dream from an iPad for five children (ages 3–3.5, Fig. 2),who are sitting closely tucked in together in a soft corner with a blan-ket over their legs. The teacher is in the middle; three children aresitting to her right and two to her left.
3. Findings
In our analysis of the teachers’ and children’s interactions duringstorytelling events, we have found intricate work that the teach-ers used to involve and sustain the children’s attentive listening,
Fig. 2.
4 The Regional Ethical Board has approved the project. Written and oral informa-ion were provided to the staff and parents and those who wished to participateigned a consent form. Participation was voluntary and the staff and the parentsere informed of their right to withdraw from the study at any time. While video
ecording, the researcher was sensitive to the reactions of the children and the staffnd stopped when there were signs of discomfort. The names and images of thearticipants are anonymized.
A. Cekaite, P. Björk-Willén / Linguistics and Education 48 (2018) 52–60 55
Excerpt 1 The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Participants: preschool teacher, children Annie, Sue, Laura and Bill.
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articipation and co-experience of the story. They deployed variousverbal and embodied – methods to secure and sustain the chil-
ren’s ‘enchantment’ with the story and to engage the child audience.mbodied displays of affective stances provided significant resourcesn the organization of and responses to the telling. The telling and lis-ening were far from one-way communication, rather they were co-peratively accomplished (Goodwin, 2017). In the following, we willescribe interactional methods the teachers used to choreograph thehild audience’s attention and understanding of the story, and outlinehe children’s responses, in this way demonstrating the participants’o-operation in the affective and aesthetic experience of the story.
.1. Setting up the story and introducing story characters
As a way of securing the toddlers’ listening comprehension,ngaging their interest, and creating conditions for literacy learning,he teachers used props and ‘baptized’ – labelled – them. They estab-ished the connection between the main characters, lexical concepts,nd visual props, disambiguating the meaning of lexical concepts. Inx. 1, the teacher introduces the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff.he initially shows and labels the main props and solicits the chil-ren’s responses. First, she shows a toy bridge, a central object in thetory plot.
The teacher repeatedly asks the children what it is (lines 1–3).
he children look at her with serious facial expressions, but do notespond, and she loudly answers the question herself, emphasizinghe word ‘bridge’ by using markedly high pitch (line 5). Immediately,nnie (1.5 y.) repeats ‘bro’ ‘bridge’, and the teacher herself usesExcerpt 2 A Bad Dream. Participants: preschool teacher, the child
an emphatic repetition to confirm Annie’s response (line 7). Next,Annie displays her engagement and understanding of the conceptby nodding.
The extract exemplifies several characteristic features: (i) theteacher skilfully uses her voice, gaze, props, and question formatto excite the children’s interest and curiosity; simultaneously, (ii)the educational practice seeps into the event in the shape of theteacher’s known-answer questions (lines 1, 3; Mehan, 1979), whichallow her to initiate a concept-learning practice. The teacher buildsup the children’s interest in the story, and their knowledge about themain characters and story conditions and enables the children (whohave heard the story before) to demonstrate their knowledge and, inthis way, contribute to the storytelling.
3.2. Teachers’ “lighthouse” gaze in creating a multipartyparticipation framework
During storytelling for a group of children, the teachers employedvarious visual resources – gaze, book, iPad – to choreograph a dialogicand active multiparty participation framework. While visual infor-mation on a book page or on an iPad screen constitutes an importantsource of story information that is accessible for young children, theteachers used what we here call a “lighthouse” gaze, i.e., sweepinggaze across the children, to solicit and sustain attentive listening,
monitor the children’s participation and their story understand-ing. Moreover, by displaying a particular (e.g., ‘sad’, ‘excited’) facialexpression, the teachers mediated – distributed – story-relevantaffective stances to the multiparty audience.ren Julia, Beth, Eva, Lilly and Sue.
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In Ex. 2, the preschool teacher is reading a story called A Bad Dreamor a group of 3–3.5 year-olds. The story is about fantasy animals, andido, one of the characters, has a dream in which his friends do notant to play with him.
When the teacher in line 7 calls attention to Fido’s affective stance:can you see how sad Fido looks”, she gazes at Julia and Beth, and shelso makes the image visually available on the iPad (lines 7–8, Fig.). Her facial expression corresponds with the textual stance of sad-ess, and Julia responds in a sad voice with a comment about Fido’sadness. She also points at her eye, illustrating a tear. The teachermphasizes Fido’s feelings using an emotion label – ‘sad’, and shexplains why Fido is sad, “you get sad if not if your friends disap-ear” (lines 11–13). Acting unfriendly is causally linked to ‘becomingad’.
While explaining why Fido is sad, the teacher turns her gaze andPad to the other children (lines 14–16, Fig. 4). She uses a lighthouseaze, shifting it between the children, from one side to the other. Herweeping gaze and facial expression carry out the interactional workf cueing and organizing the audience’s participation and attentiveistening, as well as publically distributing her embodied affectivetance. The lighthouse gaze provides the teacher with opportunitieso observe and notice the children’s actions and affective stances.he teacher conveys to the children, together with her meta-levelmotion talk, an affective and moral message about friendship andocial relations and friends, and their implications for the storyharacters’ emotional experiences.
.3. Dramatization, prosody and multiplicity of voices
Recurrently, the teachers performed stories as vivid dramatiza-ions that played out events and dialogues in full dramatic forcehrough the multiplicity of voices (Bakhtin, 1981). The teller ani-
ated principal figures and their experiences, and offered herommentary on the unfolding actions (Goffman, 1981; Goodwin,990). In doing so, the teachers invited and captivated the child audi-nce’s engaged listening, what we here call ‘enchantment’ with thetory. The toddlers’ embodied affectively valorized acts (e.g., smiles,ngrossed facial expression) were the responses that showed theirttentive listening and emotional engrossment with the events andharacters.
In Ex. 3, the teacher uses dramatic shifts in pitch, intonation and
ultiplicity of voices to build the children’s excitement.The teacher sets up a dialogue between the little goat and the trolly ‘animating’ voices and using markedly high vs. low pitch, associ-ted with small vs. big characters, respectively. According to Goffman
Excerpt 3/Fig. 5 The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Participants: presch
and Education 48 (2018) 52–60
(1981), a speaker serves as animator when s/he talks like anotherparty (Björk-Willén & Aronsson, 2014). Here, the teacher’s drama-tizations in the midst of telling contribute to gaining attention andengaged responses from the toddlers. During the little goat’s falsettotalk (pitch rise from approximately 200 to 500 Hz, line 58), Laura (1.3y.), who until now was watching the performance with a serious gaze,smiles briefly, and Billy, the youngest child (1.2 y.) in the group, burstsinto a broad smile (Fig. 5). The teacher’s multiple voices and dramaticpitch shifts are resources that enable a co-operative affective andaesthetic experience: they occasion the child audience’s attuned andexcited responses – embodied affective stances.
3.4. The rhythmic organization and pace of the telling:affordances for co-narration
The teachers calibrated the rhythm and pace of the telling usingpauses, purposefully incomplete turns, and emphatic productionof keywords. The design of their talk-in-telling was multifaceted:it built up drama and suspense, and created conditions for theyoung children to parse the meaning of the story and, importantly,to co-operate, i.e., contribute to the telling by using, for instance,verbal means and repetitions. Some children, especially the olderones, appropriated the cultural resources from the teachers’ reper-toires and exploited these affordances by recycling elements (singlewords or short phrases) or expanding on various aspects of thestory.
In Ex. 4, as the teacher reaches the climax of the story where thebig Billy Goat Gruff walks across the bridge and meets the troll, shemakes salient the keyword ‘stora’/‘big’.
The teacher emphatically pronounces elongated o and a(s::to:ra::, line 92). The elongated s in the beginning of ‘stora’delays the production of this word, and in a slightly delayed over-lap, Annie (1.5 years) joins in on the teacher’s ‘stora’/‘big’ (Fig.6). The teachers’ designedly-incomplete utterances or markedlyelongated words allowed the children to complete the utterancesby themselves, and also enabled coordinated and joint adult-childcompletions. Here, pronouncing the word in coordination with theteacher, the child’s mouth widely open, and recycling the teacher’s‘excited’ intonation, the toddler shadows (Björk-Willén, 2007) andjoins in on the affective stance of excitement.
The teacher continuously adjusts the rhythm and pace of her
telling by using pauses and prosody to highlight the keywords, whichthe toddler repeats: bridge, big, you and come (thereby displaying herunderstanding of lexical items and the story). In line 95, the teacherpauses after ‘bridge’, and Laura immediately repeats and fills in theool teacher, the children Annie, Sue, Laura and Bill.
A. Cekaite, P. Björk-Willén / Linguistics and Education 48 (2018) 52–60 57
Excerpt 4 The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Participants: preschool teacher, children Annie, Sue, Laura and Bill.
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the emergent story segment, or anticipated actions and events tofollow. In Ex. 5, Annie (1.5 y.) volunteers a demonstration of “goat iseating good grass” that expands on similar aspects of the teacher’s
ord ‘bridge’ without disturbing the teacher’s telling. A similar inter-ctional, joint completion is produced in lines 97 and 98: the teacherauses after “the big Billy Goat Gruff” and “eat you up”. Here Annieepeats “big”, which she embellishes with an elongated o coordinatedith a symbolic gesture (Fig. 7). A wide gesture of ‘bigness’ publicly
xhibits her excitement and engagement with the story (lines 100-1).he also repeats you after “eat you up”, moving her arms in excite-ent. As demonstrated in Ex. 4, the teacher’s verbal and nonverbal
ctions constitute rich contextual configurations that enable Annieo contribute to the ongoing telling. The toddler exploits variouseatures of the teacher’s performance in designing her participationnd, by repeating keywords, displays her understanding of the lexical
tems and the narrative.3.5. Children’s co-operation in storytelling as expanded andpre-emptive contributions
The teachers, together with the children, frequently chose toread stories and fairy tales that had a rather repetitive structureand recognizable literary conventions, and that were well-knownto the children. The children exploited the recognizability of thestory structure and elements (Poveda, 2003) and contributed to theembodied telling by volunteering contributions that elaborated on
telling.
58 A. Cekaite, P. Björk-Willén / Linguistics and Education 48 (2018) 52–60
Excerpt 5 The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Participants: preschool teacher, the children Annie, Sue, Laura and Bill.
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When the teacher illustrates the place where the “good grass”rows by making circular movements with her hand, she pronouncesgrass” in an appealing way (lines 35–36). The good grass is pre-ented as something desirable, and Annie immediately displays herttuned understanding: latching onto the teacher’s move, she putser left hand to her mouth, and elaborates on the teacher’s telling,s if ‘eating something’ (Fig. 8, lines 38–39). The teacher recyclesnnie’s ‘eating’ gesture (Fig. 9), embellishing ‘eating’ performanceith a delicious smacking sound that is recycled by Annie in the next
urn.
.6. Co-operating and sharing the child’s pre-emptiveontributions
Below, we will demonstrate the children’s pre-emptive – antic-patory contributions, which they volunteered prior to a relevantegment of the teachers’ telling. Their verbal and nonverbal pre-mptive contributions attended to the content and/or the affective
spects of the story. Acting in a co-operative telling mode, theeachers attended to, recycled or otherwise ratified the children’snticipatory contributions. Because many of these pre-emptive con-ributions displayed the child’s affective stance regarding the eventsof the story, the audience and the teller co-operated in estab-lishing a shared affective stance and distributing it across theaudience.
Excerpt 6 shows how the teacher attends to and recycles thechild’s anticipatory embodied stance as her own enactment of sus-pense and fear.
During the teacher’s reading of the highly exciting and scary eventin LRRH, when the wolf “opened the door and ran inside oh” (line9), Lilly vividly displays an affective stance of ‘being scared’ to theteacher: she moves her hand to her face and opens her mouth (a‘scared’ facial expression, Fig. 10, lines 10–11). Lilly, through herteacher-directed display of affective stance, anticipates that somescary things are about to happen in the story.
The teacher aligns with and ratifies the child’s enactment, whichpre-empted and embellished a particular story segment. She repeats– shadows – Lilly’s ‘scared’ performance (Fig. 11) just before shenarrates the climax event of the story when the wolf eats thegrandmother up (line 13). Simultaneously, the teacher continues
the educational project: using her ‘lighthouse’ gaze and sustain-ing the affectively valorized, ‘scared-surprised’ facial expression, shepublicly displays the affective stance – which originated in Lilly’sperformance – to the other children. In this way, the teacher invites
A. Cekaite, P. Björk-Willén / Linguistics and Education 48 (2018) 52–60 59
Excerpt 6 Little Red Riding Hood. Participants: preschool teacher, the children Julia, Beth, Eva, Lilly and Sue.
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he child audience to observe this co-operatively achieved affec-ive orientation towards the events in the story. By calibrating andne-tuning her embodied actions, the teacher is able to publiclyemonstrate that she shares the child’s affective stance. Storytelling
s co-operative (Goodwin, 2013) and collaborative: the teacher’s andhe child’s coordinated embodied moves constitute a joint aestheticnvolvement and affectively aligned performance.
. Concluding discussion
The present study has examined storytelling (teachers’ readingnd dramatic performance of fairy tales for toddlers and 3–3.5ear-olds) in Swedish early childhood education. Specifically,nalytical attention was directed at the teachers’ choreography ofhildren’s attentive listening, multiparty participation frameworks,nd the methods in which the young audience’s engrossment –n other words enchantment with the story – was solicited andollaboratively achieved.
.1. The teachers’ methods for organizing attentive listening and
o-narrationThe study has outlined the teachers’ embodied choreography ofhe telling that invited the children to participate and share aesthetic
experiences, including ways in which the teller and the audienceacted together – co-operated – in accomplishing a joint entertainingand ‘enchanting’ activity. The teachers used embodied conduct –gaze, enactments, props, marked prosody and pauses – to invite thechild audience to participate and share the affective layering of theemergent storytelling. The teachers’ gaze behaviour – a ‘lighthousegaze’ of looking out over the child audience – together with theembodied display of affectively valorized facial expression (includingvisual information from the book, iPad and props) constituted themethods used to monitor the children’s listening behaviour (de Leon,2017; Moore, 2017; Tulbert & Goodwin, 2011) and comprehension,and to mediate – distribute – relevant affective stances (regardingthe story or story characters) across the audience (Author, a).
As a method of building up dramatic experience and suspenseduring the storytelling, the teachers used multiple voices and chore-ographed the rhythm and pace of their telling. They regularlytook pauses and emphasized key words in particular segmentsof the story. In doing so, the teachers provided opportunities forthe children’s active participation in the co-narration – repetitionsand choral production of the story’s key concepts. The teach-
ers’ designedly incomplete utterances and pausing after significantchunks of information served as an invitation to children to co-participate in the display of story-relevant information. Vocally,the teachers’ talk promoted attentive and focused listening: their
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ncreased volume, pitch and emphasis focused the child audience’sttention to the dramaturgically poignant words and affectively sig-ificant aspects of the story.
.2. Co-operation in shared affective and aesthetic experience:hildren’s responses and participation
Importantly, paying analytical attention to the young children’sistening – embodied and verbal – behaviour reveals that listening,ven when it is silent, can be seen as participation, responsive tond also shaping the adults’ telling. By directing attention to theoddlers’ embodied actions, we have explored what they considero be funny and entertaining during the storytelling. The younghildren, including toddlers, attended to the teachers’ story perfor-ance by engaging in attentive listening, volunteering embodied
ffective stances, verbal repetitions, and pre-emptive moves. Theyxploited the recognizability of the story elements and contributedo the telling by co-participating in bodily repetitions, choral com-letions, elaborating on or volunteering anticipatory contributions,nd pre-empting the upcoming story segment. The co-narration wasupported by the teachers’ ratification, recycling, and sharing of thehildren’s verbal and embodied contributions across the audience. Inhis way, the children and teachers co-operated in a shared aestheticnd affective experience of the story. The children’s pre-emptiveontributions and the teachers’ uptake demonstrate that audiences consequential for how a story is enacted.
.3. Implications: storytelling as a framework for socialization
The study shows that entertainment, sense-making and knowl-dge are closely related in storytelling activities for young children.tories, especially fairy tales, are built around a similar and repetitivetructural framework and can easily become recognizable templatesor children’s aesthetic experiences, excitement and co-participationn the telling. The present study shows that performance is charac-eristic not only of everyday storytelling, but that it is also presentn early childhood education, where stories are read and told for aariety of purposes, including educational/literacy promoting ones.ffective valorization constitutes an inextricable part of captivat-
ng and enchanting telling; at the same time, affective stances areinked to the moral aspects of social conduct depicted and eval-ated in the stories. Through adult-child co-operation in a sharedffective and aesthetic experience of the story, the telling becomes
collective site for children’s socialization. In this sense, fairyales, through situated storytelling events, emerge as contemporaryultural artefacts that mediate what it is to be human; they opera-ionalize the concepts of good and bad, and children’s own concernsnd experiences (Bettelheim, 1976; Corsaro, 2005; Lubetsky, 1989).torytelling events are thereby interactional practices that allow chil-ren, together with adults, – in co-operative actions – to engage inocial cognition as well as to learn to differentiate and reintegrateocial relations, causality of action, and affect, thus becoming a mem-er of their own community. Importantly, for the young listenerstorytelling is closely linked to entertainment, enchantment and fun.
ppendix A. Appendix
.1. Transcription conventions
prolonged syllableMP relatively high amplitude
()) further comments of the transcriberdenotes rising terminal intonationindicates falling terminal intonation
ro sounds marked by emphatic stress are underlinedommer indicates talk in Swedish
.) micro pause0.5) pause length in secondsome translation to Englishindicates overlap in talk or nonverbal acts
and Education 48 (2018) 52–60
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