Story characters characterization by means of communicative strategies: asimple but comprehensive guide for teachers

Abstract

The aim of this work is to emphasise the importance of reading aloud stories meaningfully to preschool children in school and, to do this, we suggest some communicativ estrategies for teachers. We use those reading strategies to characterize characters, underlining their identity, emotions and also their location in the narration. As reading aloud is aimed to preschool children, we collect examples from different stories and classify them based on opposing characters, in order to make this proposal more simple but comprehensible. Each example provide us with different skills to improve our techniques for reading aloud meaningfully. We also propose an inventory of strategies to characterize story characters and a marking system to plan the reading aloud sessions and to show how these strategies can be used with different characters.