A Comparison of the Effects of Story Reading and Storytelling on Memory and Story Comprehension of Grade VI Pupils

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Reading is an important language skill and a highly complicated act that everyone must learn. The educational value of story reading is widely accepted. Reading aloud motivates students to read more challenging books and a greater variety. Storytelling aloud fosters the desire to read independently. Students, especially elementary school pupils, are often unable to comprehend a written text effectively. Therefore, storytelling aloud, the focus of this study, is one of the factors that motivate students to read and improve their reading fluency and comprehension.

METHODS

The present study was carried out with selected Grade VI pupils from Indang Central Elementary School following a control-group pretest-posttest design. This was implemented by dividing 34 Grade VI pupils into experimental and control groups.Pupils in the 1st group or the control group (n=17)were subjected to a story reading alone on their seats. In the second group or the experimental group (n=17), storytelling aloud was implemented in which one pupil was selected as the storyteller. T-test of the independent sample was used to determine if there was a significant difference in the story comprehension of Grade VI pupils between pupils subjected with story reading alone (control group) and storytelling aloud (experimental group). The statistical significance level was set at α < .05.

RESULTS

There was a significant difference in the ability to remember story information scores between the experimental group and the control group. The performances of pupils in terms of ability to remember story information in the experimental group significantly differed from the control group. There was no significant difference in the story comprehension scores of pupils in the experimental group and the control group.

DISCUSSIONS

The results show that storytelling enhances the pupil's ability to recall important facts about the story than reading stories. Storytelling requires more imagination than reading a story from a book. The story comprehension performance of pupils is generally the same in storytelling aloud and story reading. Thus, telling stories and reading stories produce the same level of story comprehension among Grade VI pupils. Combining these approaches could provide compelling literature experiences to influence the oral language development and story comprehension of pupils, which are critical factors in their literacy development.