It's story time!: exploring the potential of multimodality in oral storytelling to support children's vocabulary learning

Although many studies have been done on the benefits of parent/teacher‐child interactions during shared storybook reading or read‐aloud sessions, very few have examined the potential of professional storytellers' oral discourse to support children's vocabulary learning. In those storytelling sessions conducted by professional storytellers, the process of telling a story is typically not accompanied by a book, but only by the teller's well‐coordinated gestures, facial expressions and voice modulations. In this study, I perform a multimodal analysis of storytellers' oral discourse recorded during two storytelling sessions for four‐to‐five‐year‐old children. The study aims to (1) find out the specific types of vocal and visual features accompanying the spoken words which were unlikely to be known by the children but used by the storytellers for representations of events and characters, and (2) explore the potential of these multimodal features in oral storytelling to support children's inferring of word meanings. The study offers insights into multimodality in oral storytelling and implications for exploring the potential of multimodal features in this form of literacy practice to support children's vocabulary learning.