Caregivers’ strategies for eliciting storytelling from toddlers in Japanese caregiver–child picture book reading activities

Abstract

Although storytelling is a central practice in everyday interaction, it is not an easy task for young children, because it requires extended turns-at-talk. To tell a story successfully, a child requires considerable support from the recipient. In this article, we examine how storytelling is facilitated in Japanese caregiver–child interactions, focusing on the strategies employed by caregivers to elicit storytelling from 2- to 3-year-old children during picture book reading activities. Our analysis indicates that caregivers employ various multimodal strategies in encouraging children to launch, develop, and end a story, and that these strategies are themselves effectively implemented through the application of several grammatical features, conventional expressions, and formulaic words. Hence, storytelling functions as a valuable device in orchestrating attention, affect, and morality in caregiver–child interactions.