Storytelling requires sophisticated linguistic, discursive, cognitive and pragmatic capacities. Children who are good at this activity are better in language (Cooper, Collins & Saxby, 1992; Joffe, 2010), in inferential abilities (Britsch, 1992; Nicolopoulou, Scales & Weintraub, 1994), at literacy (Dickinson et al., 2003; Dobson, 2005; Makdissi & Boisclair, 2006), and have greater school achievements (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). It is thus important to understand the conditions leading children to further develop and/or to better use the competences required to understand  268  and produce good stories. The papers of this symposium use intervention procedures aiming to improve children's narrative skills or use narratives as a means to promote other skills, or both. The first paper presents results of an intervention study carried out in the home during a 6 weeks period where mothers of 4 yrs old children were instructed to have story-based conversations with them, aiming at their children's comprehension of the plot and of the characters' internal states. The second paper presents results showing that a story-based conversational intervention focused on the causes of the events lead 5-8 years old children to tell more coherent and mind-oriented stories compared to their pre-intervention ones and to those of a control group. The third paper presents results of a year-long intervention study with low-income preschoolers, based on storytelling and story-acting. That promoted narrative comprehension, literacy and socio-cognitive skills. Finally, the fourth paper presents results of an intervention study carried out during a 2-months period where 7-8 years old children listened to emotionally-laden stories and participated in conversations focused on the causes of events and on the internal states of the characters. The discussion will focus on the relation between interventions and the nature of the acquisitions manifested by the children.