Speech-language pathology, story telling and education: a new field of professional acting

Abstract

Story telling, an old popular custom belonging to oral tradition, has been rescued by education as a way to develop oral and written language. Speech-language pathology, as a sector concerned with the improvement of communication, has been acting with professionals who use spoken voice as a work instrument, among these, the educators. The aim of this work is to evaluate and to improve the experience of Speech-language pathology work with story tellers-educators. The study consisted of stages: 1) constitution of the theory of story telling, education and speech-language pathology; 2) evaluation of the effectiveness of two experiences of speech language pathology intervention on story tellers; 3) reorganization of the intervention proposal emphasizing the formation of the educator-story teller; 4) implantation of the reformulated proposal; 5) considerations about the definition of the speech-language pathology performance for the educators-story tellers. The results obtained demonstrated the importance of information on vocal health and on the use of vocal resources for story telling. The aspects of the formation pointed out by educators as the most important contribution were: information about the attention with vocal health, integration body-word-looking and work with modulation. The educators have discovered themselves as oral narrators and story tellers, feeling liberated from the support of the book and, thus, propitiating to the student more direct and more significant interaction. We can conclude that speech-language pathology has effective contributions to the educator-story tellers, and that it is important a direct intervention to the practice of story telling.