Interactive Component in Oral Narratives of Preschool Children: on the Formulation of Hypothesis

Abstract

The article presents an effort to elaborate the hypothesis for the experimental research devoted to interactive component in the oral narratives of preschool children. It is vital for psycholinguistics to reach a close approach to understanding of the essence of narrative processes which have in ontogenesis their own specifics, and according to some researches, these specifics are presented in indirect character of the process of narrative creation by child in the form of his verbal interaction with an adult.
 We assume that in order to reveal the ontogenetic cognitive discursive mechanisms involved in the process of narration, it is necessary to correlate the regularities of the verbal interaction of the participants in the narrative situation with the overall narrative tasks coming up in narrative process.
 Mеthodology, purpose and tasks of the research are determined by experimentally-genetic method (L.S. Vygotsky) put forward as main requirements «differentiation of the analysis of a thing and analysis of the process», «genetic restoration of all moments of the process development». The following of these requirements means a close following of the process of narrative development in its dynamics and the peculiarities of its formation at different stages of child’s development, paying attention to frequency facts as well as facts overcoming the limits of «narrow» phenomenon – narrative text.
 To work out the hypothesis the narrative material of the earlier made experiment with a group of 3 to 7 age children was used in which an adult took a passive part. The task was to tell the story. The material was not subjected to any analysis for the reason of the adult’s presence during the storytelling. The analysis of oral histories with interactive component included the following tasks: a) choose regular sequences of utterances in the dialogic interaction of child and adult; b) define the functional purpose of the adult’s utterance in the course in the child’s storytelling.
 The obtained results show that the adult practically at every step of the child’s age is oriented on the child’s comprehension and analyzing episodes of the history, that is on child’s formation of his mental image of structural and event sequence in history. The results of the analysis enabled us to propose a hypothesis for the next research step in the field. Along the line of this hypothesis, in the verbal ontogenesis the very nature of oral story as a multifaceted phenomenon of the discursive activity of man brings up to the surface the inner mechanisms of narration which have dialogue basis.