This study explored whether being told stories by a teacher in school 4 days a week for 10 weeks would lead to improvements in 6- and 7-year-old children's oral language, written language, and self-perception. We also explored whether these improvements would be greater than those experienced by an active comparison group that was read the same stories from books and a comparison group that continued with their usual classroom literacy practices. We used a quasi-experimental between-participants design: 194 participants took part, and classes (rather than participants) were randomly assigned to intervention conditions. Results showed that the storytelling group retold stories that were significantly longer and used a significantly wider range of vocabulary than both the group that was read the same stories and the comparison group at posttest and 3-month follow-up. The story-reading group scored significantly higher on an oral vocabulary test than the comparison group at follow-up.