Project team: Amrita Bains, Nicky Dawson, Kate Nation
Stories are a key means by which we make sense of the world. This new project asks how and what children learn from stories, and investigates differences between books, audiobooks and oral storytelling. We are delighted to be collaborating with the Story Museum and working with children, families and storytellers across the community.
Our previous work has shown that “book language” is different from our ‘everyday’ spoken language. We found that language written for children to read (or hear in the context of shared reading) has a wider range of more abstract and sophisticated words in comparison to child-directed speech
(Dawson et al. 2021). Book language also contains emotion words (
Dong & Nation, 2024), more complex words (
Dawson et al. 2023), and more complex syntactic structures (
Hsaio et al. 2023,
2024). This suggests that engaging with books provides children with access to language that they would not otherwise encounter in their day-to-day lives. A consequence of this is that children who can’t read, don’t read, or who are not read to likely to be at a substantial disadvantage compared to children who have ready access to book language.
Building on this work, our new project is called ‘Bookness’. We are investigating how other aspects of books and stories influence children’s language and learning, and how learning might differ across modalities and formats. This work is in collaboration with the
Story Museum and is funded by a grant from
St John’s College.
How about audiobooks?
An audiobook contains the same complex language as its printed counterpart. This raises the question of whether the learning opportunities afforded by printed books are in any way different to the opportunities that arise from an audio version. While the language content is the same, books are also physical objects: they have weight and substance, pictures and fonts. They have a front cover, a feel, and a smell which can spark a memory of when we read a book. While we lose these features in an audiobook, we gain features such as tone of voice and intonation that are absent in books. Does any of this matter for learning?
To answer this question, we are comparing children’s learning across the two types of language input. We are also looking at genre differences, given differences we’ve seen in fiction vs non-fiction in investigations of book language.
How about oral storytelling?
Oral storytelling is different to both printed books and audiobooks. Like audiobooks, it is based on spoken language so contains cues such rhythm and intonation. Unlike audiobooks, however, storytelling occurs in a shared setting where gestures, expressions, and audience feedback shape the experience. While this is similar to day-to-day conversation, storytellers transport listeners to imagined worlds. We anticipate that this leads them to use carefully crafted language to help children imagine the narrative and understand events, relationships, and emotions. In this sense, the language of the oral storyteller is likely to be more like book language than everyday conversation. Unlike books however, there is no physical object, and listeners are not able to pause and re-read in the way that a reader can.
Working with the Story Museum, we are investigating the key ingredients that storytellers use and asking how these influence children’s learning from story, and how this might differ from their learning from printed books and audiobooks. This is a new and exciting project, yet it connects with the past: after all, stories passed on in oral form have been the major means for sharing information across communities and generations for millennia, well before the invention of writing systems and printed books, let alone audiobooks and digital technologies.
How to get involved?
If you would like to take part in some of our experiments or wish to find out more about the project, please get in touch with Amrita Bains (
amrita.bains@sjc.ox.ac.uk).
