'Story, story, STORY!' Igbo Folktale tradition
“Story, story, STORY!” The ‘Igbo Folktale tradition,’ and oracy
The significance of this post's title - "Story, story, STORY" - lies in the actual structure of the Igbo folktale-telling itself. My dad routinely signposted each new story’s beginning with the phrase “Story, story, STORY.” I was born in London; a Nigerian by virtue of being born to Nigerian parents. So while I did catch glimpses of my Igbo culture: in the beaded traditional jewelry, the way my parents slipped between Igbo and English with seeming ease, and in my father's bedtime stories. The ‘culture’ of folktale telling [1] stimulated familial interaction between us and our father; an inquisitiveness that was often expressed in questions and followed with discussions that contributed towards our oracy development. Oracy is ‘the capacity to express oneself in and understand speech,' (Oracy, n.d.).
According to Jones (2007) oracy is ‘the verbalization of experience’. The writer 'extended his concept of oracy to include literacy.’ Oral language is “the system through which we use spoken words to express knowledge, ideas, and feelings,” and it encompasses (Harris, p. 1):
- vocabulary: an understanding the meaning of words and phrases
- syntax: an understanding word order and grammar rules
- morphological skills: an understanding the meaning of word forms and parts
- pragmatics: an understanding the social rules of communication
- phonological skills: an awareness of sounds, such as syllables and rhymes
As Morrow suggests, 'active participation in literacy experiences can enhance the development of comprehension, oral language, and the sense of story structure,' (cited in Isbell r., 2002, p. 27).
Folktales are 'characteristically anonymous, timeless and placeless tale[s] circulated orally among a people' (Folktale, n.d). This definition in conjunction with the intangibility of oration itself highlights the malleability of folktales; as something not immutable but as 'a mutual creation,' (Baker and Greene, 1977, p. xi as cited in Gallets, 2005, p. 14), which I later discuss. For the purpose of this essay, folktale telling and storytelling will be interchangeably used. Storytelling is the process of 'relating a tale to one or more listeners through voice and gesture' (Pennycuff, 2008 cited in National Council of Teachers of English, 1992, p.1). This process lends itself, as my father's Igbo folktales did, as a means of socialisation or 'enculturation': 'a process by which culturally appropriate attitudes, values, beliefs, and responses are instilled in individuals' (Mashaba, 1994).
Neither I nor my siblings understood Igbo – our mother tongue. I believe that it was our inability to speak and comprehend Igbo is one reason why he told us Igbo folk tales in the English Language. The folk tale telling might be likened to a capsule in two senses: first, as a culture capsule that intermediates between Ibo culture and language, and the English that we were accustomed to; and second, as a time capsule that bridges the gap between two points in oracy development[2]. His frequent use of code-mixed speech[3] only accentuated and eased this Igbo to our understanding into English. We needed someone more knowledgeable about English and Igbo than ourselves, from whom we could model the acceptable elements of oracy, including the vocabulary that could be used to verbally describe things that needed explanation. I have inferred from my own storytelling experiences that my father adopted the position of the scaffolder’ – a term associated with and incorporated into Vygotsky’s own theories (Mercer, 2000). This essay will discuss my storytelling time experiences within the home (from roughly five to twelve), with particular reference to Lev Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bruner’s theories.
Setting the scene: The Igbo Folktale Tradition
‘Nna’, the Igbo name for father, began each story with the phrase ‘Story, story, STORY’ with exaggerated emphasis being placed on the final ‘story.’ His pause before the third ‘story’ was always an invitation for myself and my siblings to join in the exclamation of the final ‘STORY’. Its Igbo equivalent, ‘akụkọ, akụkọ, AKUKO’ was never used. This almost ritualistic exclamation, summoning, functioned like Haroun’s quest to regain his father’s ‘Story Water subscription’ (Rushdie, p. 70) in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It arguably compensated for the omission of the traditional use of a relevant Igbo song. Each storytelling episode would end in a relevant proverb (the moral of the story) in Igbo rather than English, which is arguably a form of code-switching[4].
Nna’s storytelling before bedtime was a spontaneous, familial event, compared to our evening Bible story readings (which normally preceded folktale telling). ‘Story, story, STORY’ was usually followed by the folktale itself which was structurally interrupted by nna’s own elaboration of unfamiliar words or concepts, and our own questions and suggestions. As an illustration, the ‘talking drum,’ and ‘igwe’ often required verbal representation on the apart of the storyteller to present its meaning. The question ‘Is igwe [meaning ‘chief’] the same as the Queen?” suggests the active drawing upon previously acquired knowledge to aid my burgeoning understanding of the word ‘igwe.’ This process might be likened to the mental contextualizing processes Piaget describes in his schema theory within his theory of cognitive development. Piaget describes the mental schema as being ‘a mental representation […] a mental framework for understanding or acting on the environment’ which ‘people use to understand the world and interact with it.’ (Piaget, 1953 as cited in Nevid, p. 319). It is his avocation of two important processes which suggests that this idea of the ‘mental schema’ pervades my storytelling experiences. The first process is incorporating new objects and situtations into existing schemas’ also known as ‘assimilation’; the second is ‘creating new schemas or modifying existing ones to account for new objects or experiences’ also known as ‘accomodation’ (Piaget, 1953 as cited in Nevid, p. 319). Thus, the acquisition of new words and concepts experienced in the folk tales I was told contributed to the formation of my worldview and to the expansion of my vocabulary range.
Setting the scene: Three key Igbo folktales
There are three key folktales that I wish to describe. The first folktale ‘Why does the tortoise have a broken shell?’ introduces an iconic character in Igbo folktale – the anthropomorphised tortoise, also known as the trickster – whose trickster activities culminate towards the breaking of his shell. In the second folktale ‘Why do the sun and moon live in the sky?’ which introduces three characters: the sun, the moon and the water; explores the idea of friendship and sacrifice. The third tale, ‘The King’s Magic Drum’, follows the Tortoise’s trickster ways, as he coaxes Efriam Duke, the King of Calabar to hand over his magic drum which when beaten would conjure up a magical feast of the most delicious food[5]. Nna would invite us to suggest what wild animals the King and later the Tortoise would invite to his feasts: nnunu (bird), nkita (dog), enyimba (elephant) and so on. In this way, we acquired Igbo vocabulary and an understanding word meanings being integral to oracy (Harris, p. 1).
Links to literacy – particularly oracy
From each of these Igbo folktales one moral lesson would be learned. Nna generally permitted us to guess the moral of each tale. As an illustration, upon hearing the first folktale, I initially assumed that the moral was that we should not eat other people’s food, as the tortoise had done. The actual moral lay in selfishness: the tortoise tricked the birds into inviting him to their bird-exclusive feast, only to greedily consume all the food. The discrepancy between our understanding of the story’s moral and the actual moral clearly suggests that we did not fully comprehend these stories’ moral significance beyond the immediate storytelling context. This is supported by Calame-Griaule’s finding that ‘The storyteller moderates the degree to which he or she makes the lesson explicit by the degree of curiosity and understanding the listener demonstrates.’ He concludes with the observation that ‘Younger, less curious, or less capable individuals elicit and take part in more shallow narrative acts’ (as cited in Elaine Bennett, p. 1). Littleton and Mercer (2013) support this with their observation that such an interaction ‘can also reveal some interesting differences in perspective between adults and young children,’ (Littleton, 2013, p. 93).
The National Storytelling Association suggests that “a central unique aspect of storytelling is the reliance on the audience to develop specific visual imagery and detail to complete and co-create the story” (National Storytelling Association, 1997). Despite limited research into the possible relation between storytelling and oracy development, there are some study findings which suggests as the National Council of Teachers of English does, that ‘storytelling is a precursor for both reading and speaking’ (Scroggie, 2009, p. 78). For example, in a one-year longitudinal study which involved a group of participants aged from three to four years old, Britsch (1992) studied their experience of storytelling, and found ‘the supreme value of 'talk story,’ which she describes as the ‘cooperative narration of a story by two storytellers at the writing table.’ (Phillips, 1999, pp. 6-7).
Some of the words or phrases Nna reiterated include mbe (tortoise), nnụnụ (bird), nri (food) and ọ dara (He fell); enyi (friend), ọnwa (moon), anyanwụ (sun) and mmiri (water). The application of these words when directing questions and answering questions at nne, was the real test of language comprehension and language proficiency. It required the creative construction of Igbo phrases using starter phrases such as “Biko nyem...” (‘please bring me…’) and “Nke a bụ…” (‘this is…’) as the foundation. These ‘fill in the blank’ speech tasks, require the speaker to add on any finishing word or phrase they consider appropriate, in respect to the situation of its use. I tended to ask questions in relation to the unrealistic elements embedded in the story such as “But tortoises can’t fly?” or “Did it hurt when the tortoise fell?” which highlighted the extent to which I was actually listening to the story. I was more likely to embed these elements into my speech in the discussions which often followed and integrate them into my later retelling of the story. Rather than merely stating that the tortoise ‘dara,’ I would elaborate on how he felt when he fell or how the birds felt when tortoise ate all their food. This idea of inferring or guessing what these human-like animals are thinking or feeling resembles the idea of Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is ‘the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others […] mental state attribution improves the everyday explanations and predictions of human behaviour,’ (Jeffrey A. Greene, 2016, p. 68). It also demonstrates what Scroggie describes as ‘receptive processing’ (Scroggie, 2009, p. 83) which is important to conversational discourse.
Storytelling and ‘Scaffolding’
Despite the greater emphasis on the storyteller-listener dichotomy, there was a strong emphasis on interaction which as is Vygotsky’s argument contributed to our language development. For example, as the storyteller, nna was the scaffolder who by presenting an accurate pronunciation of Igbo words contributed to our oral language development. One example of this is his pronunciation of Igbo words, such as ‘eze’, which he often pronounced once on its own and a second time but within a sentence such as ‘Eze kpunye ya okpu eze’[6] (meaning ‘the king put on crown on the crown’). Thus, scaffolding aided the development of my phonological skills, specifically my awareness of sounds and syllables (Harris, p. 1). It was an interactive and collaborative activity, in which as Finnegan suggests ‘the participation of the audience is essential” (Finnegan, 1982, p. 374).
The scaffolding’s significance goes beyond difficulties in pronunciation arising from a word’s length and the number of syllables it contains. Scaffolding eased my assimilation of the tonal specifics of Igbo pronunciation. For instance, some word letter endings merged into the letter beginnings of the word that followed as is the case in “nso ke enye okodoho?” which means what did he say? ‘ke’ and ‘enye’ merge. I had difficulty pronouncing a string of words within a sentence, most likely because words were often pronounced more quickly and with a greater variation in the amount of stress being placed on different words, and differences in the intonation as diaresis[7] positioned underneath indicate (like Mandarin). But this was in part combatted by the questions we were asked during our interactions which not only aided our pronunciation difficulties but also our oral language proficiency. For example, through the ways in which we applied our Igbo lexicon to the questions nna asked and would reiterate in English and Igbo (Gịnị ka o mere? (What did he [the tortoise] do?); as we asked questions, retold the folktales we had been told; and in response to questions our mother (‘nne’) would ask us outside of storytelling.
Jerome Bruner, an American psychologist who was one of the first to use the concept of scaffolding, used ‘the term when investigating the ways in which very young children negotiate meaning in their early attempts to use language with adults’ (Bruner, 1973 as cited in Lytle, 2003). Although, researchers have focused their applications of this on areas such as the importance of play, this concept of ‘scaffolding’ can also successfully be applied to storytelling: nne’s aforementioned position as educator and scaffolding adult. According to Vygotsky’s own construct of scaffolding, Zone of Proximal Development (as will be discussed later), learning Igbo words occurs ‘through talking with a teacher [in this case, my father] who’: “verbally defines and then explains the concept’ (for example, the medicine man). He then ‘questions the student and corrects them presumably on the basis of the response the student gives in return’ (for example, to the question ‘Is the medicine man like a magician or witch?’ nne might say rely ‘yes’ and expatiate on the link between these two images); and finally the teacher would ‘force[s] the student to explain the concept’ (Lytle, 2003, p. 78). This points to the importance of interthinking between the storyteller (or scaffolding figure, or with a child more advanced such as myself to my younger sister) when approached with the problem of the instruction to retell a story one has just heard, which has implications for oracy development (when asked to retell an incident). This is exemplified in the cyclical model presenting the relationship between the ‘ways of using language’ which is an Intermental activity and the ‘ways of thinking’ which is an Intramental activity (Littleton, 2013, p. 99). the Intermental process enabled me to practice and contextualize my oracy development and the Intramental process which represented the continual refinement of the basis on which my burgeoning oracy ability rested[8].
Relevant empirical studies investigating storytelling in relation to oracy and language development
The responses I provided to questions and the retelling of these stories I gave, exemplify the contribution exposure to storytelling has on measured literacy skills – specifically language comprehension, which is an important component of pragmatics.
In a study carried out by Trostle and Hicks (1998), thirty-two British school children aged seven to eleven years old were randomly allocated into two experimental groups: those who were told stories and those who were read stories. One way in which this scenario deviates from my own storytelling experience is that nna always remained an objective storyteller, rather than ‘enacting the character’s role in what the researchers call the ‘character imaginary storytelling style.’ But I do not believe that I was disadvantaged because of this. After All Maguire notes that the verbal act of storytelling ‘increases concentration and the ability to think symbolically and metaphorically’ (Maguire 1985), as is exemplified in the Intramental-Intermental relationship already discussed. The researchers found that the ‘children who witnessed storytelling of a selected title scored significantly higher on measures of comprehension and vocabulary than did children who listened to story book reading’ (Trostle & Hicks, 1998, p. 127). The children who were in the storytelling condition outperformed those child participants who were in the story reading condition in terms of the ‘comprehension and vocabulary measures. The validity of findings is affirmed in a similar study carried out by Walker, in which the child participants were presented with stories either by telling, reading (presumably story book reading) or CD-ROM. It was found that those children who were told the stories obtained ‘high scores in comprehension than the other groups’ who were told the stories through the CD-ROM (despite their apparent preference for this method of transmission) and the story reading.
In an important study carried out by Isbell et al (Isbell R. S., 2004) thirty-eight child participants aged three to four years participated in a twelve-week study (almost three times as long as the other two studies earlier discussed in this essay). Each child was randomly allocated into one of two groups: Group A was randomly comprised of one class of children who were told twenty-four stories; and Group B comprising of the same number of children for whom stories were read to them. One advantage of this study is that it “Obtained oral language samples from interviews with children.” The use of interviews enabled the researchers to actually listen to the differences in these children’s speech patterns. According to Isbell et al, ‘instructions to retell the stories they had been told and a wordless picture book were used to ‘obtain samples’ for use in the measurement of each child’s language complexity and knowledge of formal story conventions. They found that the Mean length of utterance (MLU) for storytelling was higher than that for -reading (1.3 to 0.46); lower for fluency (total number of words) – (9.05 to 34) and lower for vocabulary diversity (number of different words) - (4.64 to 11.47) (Isbell R. S., 2004).
One might criticise the above studies for their small sample size (which leads to one question whether the findings are representative of the wider child demographic), it has reminded me of the marked differences that exist between my own experience of unscripted storytelling and other storytelling forms including story reading, and audiobooks. For example, there was a noticeable difference when I read ‘The Singing Man’ (Medearis, 1994) and when nne told us stories. There is not the benefit of the scaffolder who is familiar with the culture and language depicted lacked the interactive dimension the storytelling and story-making experience I shared with my family provided. In short, it lacked ‘the fluid interactive space of performance’ (Isbell R. S., 2004).
The relevance of Lev Vygotsky’s ‘The Zone of Proximal Development’ to storytelling
One might argue that the storytelling structure described in ‘setting the scene’ resembles Lev Vygotsky’s ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ model[9] which Vygotsky himself defines as ‘the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (Wertsch, 1984, p. 8). When translated into storytelling, ‘the actual development level’ becomes the child listener’s present oracy ability. The level of potential development is translated into the reciprocal relationship the adult storyteller shares with the myself – as the one unaccustomed to the different units which constitute oral Igbo language. As K. W. Zabel suggests, “storytelling is the cornerstone of the teaching profession” (Zabel, 1991 as cited in Scroggie, 2009, p. 82). Therefore, as the scaffolder and ‘teacher,’ Nne bridged two different worldviews, two camps of knowledge: one with underdeveloped oracy skills due to: insufficient exposure to the Igbo language and an undeveloped understanding of ‘conversational implicature’ (Siobhan Chapman, 2009, p. 89) which implies an underdeveloped understanding of the contexts of accepted language use.
Conclusion
Throughout this essay I have analysed my experience as the recipient of the Igbo folk tales my father (nne) would told myself and my younger siblings in our childhood, and related such experiences to the selection of empirical studies and theories which have been explored. The studies themselves, with the findings they have obtained, culminate to ‘explain’ the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ behind such storytelling experiences – which ‘provid [ed] a social context for literacy’ (Pennycuff, 2008) and the oracy competency I exhibited in later childhood. Although now I cannot proficiently speak Igbo and partially understand it when spoken, I cannot deny the storytelling experiences I did have has influenced the vocabulary and understanding of pragmatics and semantics so essential to my spoken language outside among extended family members (Igbo culture) and in environments outside of the home. I am inclined to take this as potential evidence of the link to between oracy and the early storytelling experiences one has. This is debatable, of course.
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[1] By the use of the word ‘culture’ I mean, a traditional or normative activity which entails certain rules and customs, its participants are already accustomed to or soon become acquainted with.
[2] Opportunity to link this to language as a ‘cultural tool’
[3] What is code-mixed speech? (Bokamba (1989) as cited in Ayeomoni, 2006, p. 2) ‘the embedding of various linguistic units such as affixes (ound morphemes), words (unbound morphemes), phrases and clauses from a co-operatve activity where the participants in order to infer what is intended, must reconcile what they hear with what they understand.’
[4] What is code-switching? When one switches from using one language code system to another.
[6] Father’s given translation
[7] Dieresis: ‘a mark (‘’) placed over a vowel to indicate that it is sounded in a separate syllable, as in naïve,’
[8] ‘individuals in a group can also gain new levels of understanding through co-construction, if they jointly construct new explanations with their partners’
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