Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale practitioner-research project which worked with reluctant writers in a primary school in the North of England to explore the role of oracy in the development of literacy. Carter (2000) and Duncan (2009) point out that literacy in the form of the written word has only existed for 3% of the time humans have used language. The other 97% comprises of oral storytelling and the spoken word. Clearly we have been storytellers for much longer that we have been writers

For example the storytelling of Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey, which literary critics readily accept as great works of literature, is now widely considered by many historians and other scholars to have actually been composed through talking (or more accurately through singing) rather than through writing (Carter, 2000, Corbett,2010). Often such stories were improvisations (similar to contemporary jazz, jamming, rap or traditional music and folk-songs) where one performance is seldom the same as another. In today’s literate society it is difficult to imagine how magnificent works of art, great stories and legends came to be composed in the absence of any form of reading or writing. On the contrary, it now seems that these shared worlds of meaning came into being through the interplay of a range and combination of storytelling ‘technologies’ and resources. These include orally shared mental pictures, familiar sounds and words, remembered rhymes or rhythmic phrases, individual and collective accounts of day to day human experience, and the heroic tales and legends which have carried human imagination and transmitted the hopes and fears of our ancestors across the ages.