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Over the past 20 years, a considerable body of research by applied linguists, educationalists, and child psychologists has established the developmental significance of storytelling and imaginary play during early childhood. This book foregrounds the power of children’s own stories and their dictation and dramatisation in the early years classroom. It provides empirical evidence that storytelling and story acting, a pedagogic approach pioneered by Vivian Gussin Paley (1990), affords rich opportunities to foster learning within a play-based and language rich curriculum. Narrative and imaginary play are widely recognised as valuable strategies for the development of spoken language and literacy within early years and elementary classrooms. Nonetheless in accountability cultures, where early years educators are pressured by the ‘drive to literacy’ and policy expectations regarding contested concepts such as ‘reading readiness’ (Whitebread and Bingham, 2012), practitioners often find it hard to make space for children’s own stories. Drawing on studies in the USA and the UK, this edited collection illustrates and explores the multiple dimensions of Paley’s storytelling and story-acting approach and shows how these interrelated practices enhance language and literacy learning, and contribute to an inclusive classroom culture that embraces young children’s diverse interests and learning needs.

This chapter considers the reading experiences of voluntary reading groups in schools, their collaborative interpretation of children’s/young adult literature, and their construction of reader identities. We focus on a study of secondary school reading groups in different parts of the UK as they took part in a scheme to ‘shadow’ the judging of two prestigious children’s book awards: the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. The groups spent part of the summer term reading and discussing books that were short-listed for one or both of these awards. They were then able to compare their views with those of the judges. Our study of this process was carried out in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), who run the awards and the shadowing scheme and wished to evaluate the success of shadowing. The work was funded by the Carnegie UK Trust.\ud A strong theme that emerged in the study was that, despite their institutional settings and, to some extent, their alignment with curricular priorities (e.g. many were reported as contributing to their school’s literacy strategy) the groups presented themselves as determinedly extracurricular. While reading for pleasure is part of the curricula for English in the UK, group leaders and members saw English as dominated by objectives-led approaches to reading and by assessment. By contrast, reading group experiences were characterized as being about ‘fun’, ‘enjoyment’ and ‘choice’. Groups were partly defined by their contrast with curricular reading, and considerable work went into creating and sustaining this distinctiveness. But also, in a context in which reading is often regarded as ‘geeky’, an activity for ‘boffins’, groups sought to create reading communities in which the pleasure of reading could be shared.\ud In the chapter we consider, in turn, evidence from interviews and conversations with reading group members, and observations and audio-recordings of reading group meetings. In combination, these demonstrate how ‘non-school’ reading practices, relationships and identities are worked at and maintained: both accounted for in talk about reading and enacted within reading group practices.