Many storytellers, educators, and researchers advocate that storytelling can contribute significantly to early literacy development. Early childhood education needs to embrace literacy programs that actively employ storytelling to bridge students' established oracy skills and their newfound literacy skills. By doing this, children will encounter a broad range of language: new words, archaic expressions, puns, phrases, rhymes, metaphors, and more. This establishes an extensive oral language base which builds literacy skills, such as word recognition, spelling, grammar, literary conventions, and comprehension. It is essential to present storytelling and literacy experiences that are meaningful to the children, and therefore their social and cultural experience needs to be reflected in the choice of stories and the choice and use of text. Teachers should cultivate the development of children's literacy skills by providing opportunities to play with words, with story, and with text. (Contains 16 references.) (SR)