Question
How does storytelling help mental imagery and reading?
Answer
Storytelling is important for developing mental imagery, which is being able to see pictures in your head. If you like to read, when you read a book as an adult, you probably see pictures in your head. As you're reading a story, you are the person that you're reading about and you see the landscape. You understand what that house is going to be like. You put yourself in that story through your mental imagery. Like all of these other aspects of language development and representational thinking, imagery has to be developed. It is constructed by children. From the time they're born, they begin to slowly develop the capacity to construct pictures in their heads of things that are not physically present. This is developmental. Part of it is just a function of age, but a lot of it is also a function of experience.
In today's world, children are bombarded with outside images. If they sit in front of a TV to hear their stories, then SpongeBob looks one way. He doesn't look any other way. They don't have to imagine what Elsa looks like and whether she has pink skin or blue skin or brown skin. They know exactly what Elsa looks like. When we tell kids stories rather than even showing them pictures in books, they have to construct a picture in their minds of what the characters look like and what the environment looks like. Thinking about all of those kinds of things gives them a lot of practice for developing the ability to be able to see those pictures in their heads. That has a huge impact on their later reading as well as other aspects of language development and problem-solving.
Why don't we hear about mental imagery when we're hearing about how we teach kids how to read? We don't have a way of measuring what pictures people see in their heads. When researchers are looking for aspects of what makes a child a good reader and what kind of supports they need to be able to be an effective decoder and understander of texts that they read, they can't study mental imagery very well because it's inside our heads. At some point in time, maybe we'll have the technology through neuroscience to be able to plug little electrodes onto our heads and study how images are constructed. But for now, we don't have that empirical basis for that information.
We do know it works and we know it is important. I've talked to many people and asked them, "Do you see pictures in your head when you're reading for fun?" The people who say no are those who don't like to read. Storytelling is a way of developing both this foundational skill and becoming a better reader. The more fun you have reading because you see wonderful pictures in your head, the more you're going to want to read and the better reader you're going to become just because of practice.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, The Ordinary Magic of Storytelling, presented by Stephanie Goloway, EdD.
