Children's Narrative Competence Research Articles

Trilingual children’s narratives: a longitudinal study of lexical development

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on vocabulary development in oral language productions of three elementary school-age sibling pairs growing up in a trilingual setting. This longitudinal study describes the development of the children's narrative competence over three years. The corpus analysed consists of retellings of animated films. The contribution deals with the lexical development in the three languages of the children, in particular the length of the productions, lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. Lexical diversity is measured by the Guiraud Index. It is assumed that the children's vocabulary becomes more diverse with increasing age. Lexical sophistication is examined by measuring the average frequency of words used by the participants. It is assumed that as children's vocabularies grow, they will include more and more ‘rare’ low-frequency words in their productions. Assuming that the school language is the dominant language, the question is whether lexical diversity and sophistication increase with age in all three of the children's languages, or whether this is only the case in the school language. The results show that lexical development varies from child to child. However, a certain trend can be observed, indicating that school vocabulary is becoming more sophisticated.

The contribution of mother‐father‐child interactions to children's emotion narratives

AbstractParents' sensitivity during interactions with their children has been associated with children's emotion narratives elicited using story completion tasks, but almost all of this research focused on mothers and was based on a dyadic, parent‐child focus. The goal of the present study was to expand this research by studying triadic, mother‐father‐child interactions and their associations with children's narratives. Seventy‐one families with their 4.5‐year‐old children were observed in the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) procedure to assess Family Cooperation, and children were administered the MacArthur Story‐Stem Battery (MSSB) to assess Coherence, Parental Representations, and Engagement with the task. Regression analyses indicated that controlling for children's Narrative Competence and Effortful Control, children who were part of more cooperative family interactions produced narratives that were more coherent, and they were more engaged during the task. No associations were found with children's representations of parents. Directions for future studies as well as clinical implications are discussed.

Narrative Competence in Pretense Play and Stories

The purpose of the present study was to explore a method for analyzing children's narratives in pretense play and replica stories. A theoretical framework was derived from Bruner (1990) and Fein (1989). This framework served to construct the Realistic-Imaginal Scale (RIS) which incorporated behavioral components appearing in the relevant empirical literature. The scale includes 17 items grouped into 4 categories and measures narratives on a realistic-imaginary continuum. A limited attempt to test the applicability of the RIS, using pretense play episodes of Israeli kindergarten children, and the replica stories of US preschoolers, revealed well-distributed scores correlated with Applebee's narrative organization scores. The scale yielded high inter-scorer reliability. Distributions of scores showed a striking resemblance between the two culturally and contextually different samples. The strong theoretical framework of the RIS makes it a promising tool for the analysis of young children's narrative competence, thus providing a potent tool for theoretical and research.

Kindergarteners' Narrative Competence Across Tasks and Time

ABSTRACTThe authors investigated children's narrative competence by analyzing the development of the reciprocal relationship between storytelling and story retelling performances over a school year through a cross-lagged panel design. The participants in this study were 170 Italian kindergarten pupils (M age = 4.98 ± 0.31 years). Children were asked to produce oral narratives in two different tasks: a storytelling and a story retelling task. Narrative competence was assessed in terms of structure and coherence. The cross-lagged panel analyses showed that both storytelling and story retelling tasks are stable constructs, but they differ in the emphasis on coherence. Data confirmed the pivotal role played by storytelling as a task, and structure as a component in fostering the development of children's narrative competence. Overall, results from this study suggest that storytelling and story retelling are tasks that involve interrelated but not overlapping processes, and trigger different aspects of narrative competence.

Explaining Events in Narratives: The Impact of Scaffolding in 4 To 12 Year Old Children

The focus of this article is the manner in which 4 to 12 year old children deal with the evaluative component of narratives (Labov & Waletsky, 1967). After spontaneously telling their first version of a story of a misunderstanding between two characters, constructed on the basis of a sequence of five images, children participated in a scaffolding procedure during which they were questioned about the reasons for the events. After this non-intrusive, Piagetian-styled clinical interview, children were asked to recount the story a second time. For children's first narratives, our study confirms earlier results by showing that, before 8-9 years, children rarely mention the epistemic states of the characters. The false belief of one of the characters and its rectification are rarely mentioned before10-11 years and even at that age by few children. Presenting a story based on a misunderstanding does not facilitate this kind of narration. However, in the narrative produced after scaffolding, 6-7 year old children increase considerably their references to the characters' internal states, and from 8-9 years, the expression of false belief and of its rectification. These results call for multiple evaluations in order to best grasp children's narrative competence.

Genre and evaluation in narrative development.

In this study I examine Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. The questions addressed are: (1) How does the use of evaluative language vary in fictional and personal narratives? (2) Is there a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres and children's age and socio-economic status (SES)? The sample consists of 444 narratives produced by 113 Venezuelan school-age children participating in 4 narrative tasks, in which personal and fictional stories were elicited. Findings suggest that age and socio-economic status have a greater impact on the use of evaluation in fictional stories than in personal narratives. Low SES and younger children are at a greater disadvantage when performing fictional narratives than when performing personal narratives. These results strongly imply that children's narrative competence cannot be assessed in a single story-telling task, given the importance that task-related factors seem to have on narrative abilities.

Telling It How It Was

While a number of weaknesses have been identified in children's eyewitness, or evidential narrative accounts (e.g., Aldridge & Wood, 1998; Richardson, 1993; Walker & Warren, 1995), analyses of children's non-evidential narratives indicate that children as young as two years can be competent narrators (e.g., Fivush, Gray & Fromhoff, 1987). A variety of factors might contribute to the child's reported poorer performance in the evidential setting. For example, the interview topic (and associated consequences) is likely to be more stressful, the child is less likely to be familiar with the interview setting and the interviewer, and the child is less likely to be prompted for an answer in the evidential setting. This study examines young children's narrative performance in an evidential and in a non-evidential (experimental) setting to investigate which factors might contribute to differences in narrative performance. Findings suggest that, while children's narrative competence develops with age, situational factors largely account for the differences in performance in children's evidential and non-evidential narratives. However, we do suggest that interviewers could do more to facilitate, in a non-leading fashion, children's evidential narratives. More specifically, we propose that children should be offered a 'second chance' to tell their story before the interviewer moves on to specific questioning.

Focus on qualitative methods: Interviewing children

The focus in health-related research on children has shifted from seeking information about children to seeking information directly from them. Children, even as young as three years old, can give graphic descriptions and have excellent recall of experiences related to adverse events, such as illness and hospitalization. Children use scripts as the primary means of anticipating, comprehending, and re-creating real-life experience. The content, timing, number, and structure of interviews will influence the completeness, accuracy, and consistency of children's recall of events. Although at times conflicting, the findings from recent scholarship on children's narrative competence will assist researchers to select the interviewing strategies most likely to yield faithful representations of experience. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Res Nurs Health 22:177–185, 1999

Interviewing children.

The focus in health-related research on children has shifted from seeking information about children to seeking information directly from them. Children, even as young as three years old, can give graphic descriptions and have excellent recall of experiences related to adverse events, such as illness and hospitalization. Children use scripts as the primary means of anticipating, comprehending, and re-creating real-life experience. The content, timing, number, and structure of interviews will influence the completeness, accuracy, and consistency of children's recall of events. Although at times conflicting, the findings from recent scholarship on children's narrative competence will assist researchers to select the interviewing strategies most likely to yield faithful representations of experience.

Narrative analysis: Filtering individual differences in competence

The choice of methods of analysis, in large part, determines judgments about children's narrative competence. If narratives are seen as a window on the mind, then narrative analysis is the filter for revealing relationships between universal categories and sociocultural variation in narrative production. This article begins with a discussion of narratives as a way of thinking, including the universal and particular aspects. Second, two different perspectives for analyzing narratives are introduced and illustrated with data collected from one adolescent who exemplifies an increasingly common dilemma for language educators and clinicians: When does a sociolinguistic difference in narrative style indicate a learning impairment? Finally, a discussion of the implications of narrative analyses for the practice of teaching, learning, and assessment is given.