Drama-based interventions and narrative

This chapter identifies four general types of drama-based interventions designed to promote young children’s narrative development: play-training interventions, writing-improvement interventions, Paley-paradigm interventions and readers-theatre interventions. These diverse interdisciplinary interventions were designed to foster a variety of narrative outcomes, such as the production, comprehension and/or recall of either oral or written narratives. The merits and challenges of the research on drama-based narrative interventions, and the potential these interventions hold for supporting young children’s acquisition of narrative skills and influencing early childhood education curricula, are discussed.