Author Information
Nguyilan Shaaji, Emirates National Schools, United Arab EmiratesAlueshima Jennifer Shaapera, Blossom Early Education Institution, United Arab Emirates
Abstract
Emirati children arrive in KG2 as competent storytellers. Most have spent their first five years in households where narrative is an ordinary daily practice: a grandmother recounting life before the oil economy, moral tales told at bedtime, the conversational turn-taking of the majlis. When formal English literacy instruction begins, it usually begins with imported texts about snow, forests and farmyard animals, and the confident five-year-old narrator often becomes a quiet one. This paper reports a small-scale practitioner action research study conducted in a single KG2 classroom in an English-medium IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) setting in the United Arab Emirates. Over several inquiry cycles, the class teacher and a research partner introduced three linked practices: co-constructed Storytelling Adventures built from Emirati folktales and family narratives; Word Detective play, in which children hunted for sounds and rhymes inside stories they already knew; and Visible Thinking routines anchored by familiar cultural artefacts. Data was generated through pedagogical documentation, audio-recorded storytelling sessions, anecdotal records, samples of child talk during play, and teacher reflective journals. These are observations from one classroom, generated by the teachers who taught it, and they carry the limits that implies. They do not establish that culturally familiar storytelling causes measurable literacy gains. What they do suggest is more modest and, we think, still worth saying: cultural familiarity appears to function as a scaffold for early English literacy rather than a decorative addition to it and treating it as such costs a teacher very little.
Paper Information
Conference: ECE2026Stream: Challenging & Preserving: Culture
Published: Wednesday, September 23, 2026
This paper is part of the ECE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Shaaji N., & Shaapera A. (2026) From Majlis to Manuscript: Leveraging Emirati Oral Traditions to Scaffold Phase 1 Literacy in the PYP ISSN: 2188-1162 The European Conference on Education 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 679-690) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2026.52
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2026.52
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