Story Listening Systems: Emergent Literacy without Computer Screens

Kind of let the blog get away from me these past two weeks, but now I am here to present an interesting article by Justine Cassel, titled “Towards a model of technology and literacy development:  Story listening systems.”  In this post, I wish to generalize what “story listening systems” are, and to elaborate on some specific examples which I found interesting in the article (altogether, there are 6).  In the post after this, I want to tie some of the ideas of this article with my own ideas pertaining to literacy in Secondary Education.  For the most part, this article is geared towards literacy for children 4-7 years of age.

The article first sets out to define what Story Listening Systems (SLS) are.  In short, the main goal of using story listening systems is to help foster emergent literacy by:

-asking children to tell a story (orally)

-to share these stories with a partner, or even use a computer as a partner (collaborate)

-to avoid using a desktop or laptop (no conventional computers with keyboards)

-making sure children are coming up with their own stories, and not repeating prompts

                                                                                                                                            (p. 76).

Cassell argues that placing students in front of computers “…makes it difficult both for children to collaborate, and for them to involve their bodies in play” (p. 79).  Without collaboration, children aren’t able to fully access their capacity to share language while appropriately conveying context.  What might be a highly detailed and contextualized story between two peers may potentially be dumbed down into a fragmented and decontextualized story on paper or on keyboard.

This is the last piece of intro text that I’ll include before I go on to explain a few of the SLS, as it sums up the goal of the project nicely:

“Thus, the SLS model relies on two features of childhood and two features of new technology:  children’s inherent ability and desire to tell stories, which may contain within them the skills required for writing; the support that children provide to one another in the narrative play arena, which may be as good as, or even superior to that provided by adults; the ability of new technology to be removed from the old screen-and-desktop context; and its capacity to support children as producers as well as consumers of content” (p. 82).

The SLS, TellTale, is a segmented recording system which uses the segments of a caterpillar as a symbol.  Children are to record their story into 5 segments, using each piece of the caterpillar as a segment of their story.  After two tries (most of the kids recorded their whole story in only 2 segments), the experimenter attempts to prompt them to use all segments of the caterpillar to record different parts of a story.  The article itself points out a child who made short recordings on her third try, and then took the same story and elaborated on it for her fourth try.  She was able to find the structure of her own story, which provided “… an example of metalinguistic awareness of discourse segmentation” (p. 85). 

Same the CastleMate is a computer program where children interact with an androgynous figure projected onto a screen (the reason I state Sam is androgynous is because the article mentions most preschoolers were confused and wanted to know).  This program comes closest to the SLS ideal because it involves collaboration between the child and the program.  The program (Sam) starts out telling a story, and then asks the child to tell their own story, using a toy castle and objects inside as they tell Sam a story.  The main point of the exercise is to utilize computer prompts to tell a story which is more advanced in dialogue.  Cassell concludes that this form of “play” helps put the child into the zone of proximal development, because in it “children learn through their participation in activities that are slightly beyond their competence, with the assistance of adults or more skilled children” (p. 92).  Conversely, when children were left just another child to tell a story to, the stories they told each other were typically unorganized and scatterbrained. 

I will elaborate more in the next blog on the main tenets of the Story Listening Systems, and how I believe they can hold some merit when talking about a Secondary Education setting.  But the main point of this entry was to show how technology can be used in emergent literacy, and the importance of utilizing technology to enhance collaborative play-like activities to promote better overall literacy skills.  In this case, the basis was storytelling. 

Cassell, J. (2004). Towards a model of technology and literacy development:  Story listening systems. Applied Developmental Psychology, 25, 75-105. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.lib.iastate.edu:2048/science/article/pii/S0193397303001369