Purpose Game-based learning can support young children’s vocabulary, sequencing and collaborative talk, yet English-medium classroom designs that explicitly introduce early literary metalanguage for children under eight remain under-documented. This study aims to develop and examine Tale Track, a teacher-mediated, game-like tabletop pedagogy designed to promote active participation, create challenge without competition and support story retelling through the selection and manipulation of character and item cards. The intervention uses a two-board structure: an open retelling board followed by a structured board for plot, character and story-message/moral learning. It also aims to support lexical precision, story recall, plot sequencing, character-role understanding and story-message/moral articulation. Design/methodology/approach The intervention had two stages to engage children with the story and its literary metalanguage. Stage 1 used enlarged picture-book pages and an open retelling board with movable scenes and characters for matching and guided retelling. Stage 2 used a literary-concepts board with sections for plot, character and story-message/moral discussion to support sequencing, role sorting and discussion. An assessment rubric recorded performance at both stages. A pilot case study involved 21 Grade 1 pupils in an English-medium classroom in Salalah, Oman; one did not finish. Evidence included VSI, NSS-EC, PSA, CIS and TCR measures, collected across rolling one-day sessions for analysis. Findings Children engaged well with the intervention and completed both stages consistently. In the complete-case subset (n = 20), descriptive results showed relatively strong performance in lexical specificity (VSI M = 1.70 / 2), plot sequencing (PSA M = 10.30 / 12) and character-role identification (CIS M = 4.10 / 5), while story-message/moral articulation was more challenging (TCR M = 1.15 / 2). Exploratory associations among outcomes were uniformly positive, and qualitative evidence pointed to mediated meaning-making within a teacher-guided design. These findings are presented as descriptive and exploratory rather than causal. Originality/value The study offers a low-cost, adaptable game prototype for future work that more directly centers child co-construction, critical interpretation and cultural reframing. The study contributes a novel two-board instructional design that integrates guided retelling, categorization, tangible manipulatives and AI-generated visual cards within a teacher-mediated framework. Unlike broader game-based learning research, this paper offers a carefully bounded design case that demonstrates how early narrative understanding, sequencing, lexical specificity and story-message/moral articulation can be scaffolded through a low-cost, contextually adaptable pedagogical prototype.
Ravari et al. (Fri,) studied this question.