This paper discusses an analysis of adult-child social interactions to discover which instructional stimuli are effective in producing a classroom milieu rich in storytelling events. Ten fifth-grade students with low reading scores, eight black and two white, were tape-recorded over 8 weeks as they created stories in their journals and in classroom interactions in response to literature, to their own experiences, to the experiences of others, and to the teacher's questions. Out of 286 stories recorded, 156 were oral and spontaneous, 36 were spontaneous, but with an embedded narrative incident, and 101 were written in the form of books, poem-stories, or journal entries. Student stories were most often told in response to other students' stories, and the storytelling had a cumulative, reciprocal effect as students borrowed features from one another's stories. Teacher questioning about literature, writing, and storytelling was the second most productive stimulus for storytelling. To encourage what was believed to be the more relational learning style of black children, the children's narratives were allowed to flow conversationally whenever they arose during the story hour. Minority students have a great deal to contribute to the language development of nonminority students, and pedagogic strategies should be revised to build on rather than exclude cultural differences. Eight references are appended. (CJS)