Storytelling as a theory‐building activity

TLDR

Stories function as theories of events, providing explanations that can be challenged and refined, and everyday family storytelling fosters perspective‑taking, critical thinking, and other intellectual skills long before formal schooling. The study investigates dinner‑time storytelling among English‑speaking, Caucasian‑American families. Co‑narrated dinner stories activate and enhance critical social, cognitive, and linguistic skills that underpin scholarly discourse, and this theory‑building is strengthened by participants’ familiarity with one another and the narrative events.

Abstract

The present study examines the activity of storytelling at dinnertime in English‐speaking, Caucasian‐American families. Our findings demonstrate that, through the process of story co‐narration, family members draw upon and stimulate critical social, cognitive, and linguistic skills that underlie scientific and other scholarly discourse as they jointly construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct theories of everyday events. Each story is potentially a theory of a set of events in that it contains an explanation, which may then be overtly challenged and reworked by co‐narrators. Our data suggest that complex theory‐building through storytelling is promoted by (and constitutive of) interlocutors' familiarity with one another and/or the narrative events. As such, long before children enter a classroom, everyday storytelling among familiars constitutes a commonplace medium for socializing perspective‐taking, critical thinking, and other intellectual skills that have been viewed as outcomes of formal schooling.