Struktura narativnog iskaza kod dece predškolskog uzrasta

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to present the narrative characteristics of preschool children by analysing children's stories that thematize everyday life experiences as well as invented stories. The research included twelve preschool children, which gave us a corpus of 24 stories. This study mainly considers: 1) starting and finishing stories, 2) the stories' characters and their (reported) speech, 3) narrative style characteristics. The corpus shows: 1) that children use typical expressions when they start telling invented stories, and use similar beginnings in all of their everyday life stories; as opposed to that, they often have difficulties finishing a story; 2) in everyday life stories the protagonist is usually the narrator himself, and is joined by the members of close or extended family, while in invented stories the range of characters is much wider; also, the reported speech can rarely be found in the children's stories and is usually connected to the situations that are close to their personal experiences; 3) repetition, humour and gradation stand out as narrative style characteristics. The methodological implications of this study are: 1) during storytelling activities children should be more encouraged to create the plot and problem situations, 2) during storytelling activities children should be more encouraged to create dialogue between characters, 3) while narrating children should be encouraged to use functional description more, considering the lack of it in these stories.