Gesture like a kitten and you won't forget your tale: Drama-based, embodied story time supports preschoolers’ narrative skills

Oral narrative comprehension is an important precursor to reading comprehension. Supporting preschool students in building strong oral narrative comprehension skills prepares them to be successful once they enter formal schooling. Gesture and body movement have been shown to support children's oral narrative comprehension and recall skills. This study examines whether drama-based instruction (DBI)—an organic, inherently gesture- and movement-based approach to teaching—during storytime fosters preschool children's narrative comprehension and recall. In this paper, we compare story retells by preschool students who participated in a DBI storybook reading (n = 90) with retells by preschool students who heard the same book during a business-as-usual (BAU) storytime (n = 106). Results show that using embodied behaviors (i.e., gesture, facial expression, body movement, vocal change) during story retelling was associated with recalling more story elements during a free retell task (when children are asked to retell the story without additional prompts), although not during a prompted retell task (when children retell the story by responding to questions). Students who participated in the DBI storytime used twice as many story-relevant embodied behaviors during retell tasks compared to their BAU peers. Additionally, embodied behavior significantly mediated the relation between treatment status and free retell scores. This study offers promising evidence as to the efficacy of using drama-based storytime in preschool classrooms to support listening comprehension and recall of oral narratives. Findings support a theory of embodied language learning and suggest potential benefits of drama to enhance literacy learning.