As an oral storyteller I sometimes wish it was an offence under the Trade Description Act to read aloud a story and describe it as ‘storytelling’ – the two activities are that different! Reading aloud is important, and something that every parent should do regularly to their young kids to demonstrate their love of reading and how words come alive off a page.
But . . . when you read from a book, your primary focus is on the words (and you look up from time to time to make sure your kid/class is still paying attention). When you tell a story, it’s eye contact eye contact eye contact all the time, which makes the story more immediate and compelling;
when you read from a book you use the author’s words and it never changes. Unfortunately, the way we write changes over time – so Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm feel very long-winded to today’s audiences. When you tell a story you use your own words, which means you can tailor your telling to suit your child/audience and their language/attention levels, adding or omitting description, adding local references. If you’re telling in your second language, that’s not a problem, because people will respond to you an individual, and your accent, your way of putting words together, will add to the uniqueness of the telling. If you try to read in a second language, you will probably stumble over pronunciations and your mistakes will be very obvious.
When you tell, you naturally incorporate a lot more non-verbal communication – facial expressions, mimetic actions and gestures (after all, both your hands are free because they’re not holding a book!) – which makes the telling more visual;
Storytellers often involve audience participation through various techniques such as call and response, predicting (here, there and . . . .? “Everywhere!” choruses the audience) simple repetitive actions for the audience to join in, chorusing refrains, inviting members of the audience to join them as characters (eg in an ever-lengthening chain story such as The Enormous Turnip).
Kids often excitedly clamour, ‘Tell me a story! Rarely do they say ‘Read me a story.’