The Story Road to Literacy

This collection of original stories collected from oral tellings from immigrant students in grades 1 to 12 provides, in addition to useful teaching strategies, bibliographies of folktales from various cultures and other helpful information for teachers and librarians working with ESL students.

This book grew out of research conducted during a sabbatical as Associate Professor of Education at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. The study focused on collecting folktales from recently emigrated school children in order to build a curriculum to support the growth of English literacy in these students and their native English-speaking classmates. The students ranged in age from first graders to high school seniors. The countries represented were: Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Colombia, India, Iran, Korea, Laos, Mexico, and Somalia. An interesting finding of the study is that children from completely different countries, of different ages, and in different school districts, tell the same stories—variants on the Wolf and the 7 Little Kids, Cinderella, and so on. The study was conducted over the course of one school year in two states and three public school districts: one inner city, one middle-class, and one suburban upper middle-class. Along with the stories themselves, The Story Road to Literacy provides suggested teaching strategies. These strategies were selected to provide opportunities to stimulate reading, writing, talking, listening and thinking—all crucial components of literacy. Following this, there are suggestions for teachers to invite their students to tell, write, and share their own stories and to create new folk tales. The book contains the original unedited stories, the stories in the original handwritten form, student pictures, and copies of the stories in edited format. Appendices provide copy-ready stories in both formats for reproduction, lists of like folk tales from varying cultures, information about the cultures of students represented in the study, and other helpful bibliographies. This book will be particularly of use to ESL teachers and classroom teachers with ESL students. Because of the primary sources and the story collections, librarians, both school and public will find this book a must. Grades K-12.