A research study of African-American preschool and kindergarten children in urban settings was conducted to generate insights about narrative development. This article discusses the use of two different narrative styles, narratives as text and narratives as performance, and the tension that often exists between these two perspectives. The production of a well-formed narrative text may not necessarily be accompanied by an engaging performance and vice versa. More importantly, there is a tension in how narratives are evaluated in school. Data suggest that schools may emphasize an orientation toward narrative as text and diminish the importance narrative performances, especially those that build social relationships and social identities at the expense of ''wellstructured'' text.Telling stories is a ubiquitous activity in preschool and early elementary classrooms. There are formal storytelling times, such as sharing time and when teachers read storybooks to children, and informal storytelling times, such as stories that children tell to adults to explain errant behavior or to each other during play. Telling a ''good'' story is both a matter of creating a ''good'' performance and a matter of framing experience in ways that are efficacious, either for one's own goals or for collective goals.
Oral narratives are increasingly used in speech and language evaluations for measuring language skills, and to measure children's organizational skill within a broader communicative context. Because of this, oral-narrative analyses are applied to diverse age ranges and populations. However, there are few studies examining the production of narratives of child speakers of African American English (AAE), and these previous studies offer conflicting views on the nature of narratives in this population. Because of this, the purpose of this study was to investigate the production of narratives of AAE speaking children using elicitation procedures that were standard across participants. Fifteen partici-pants were selected from a predominantly African American low-income com-munity of Springfield, Massachusetts. Highpoint and story-grammar analyses-two analyses that are often applied narratives in previous studies- were applied to the samples gathered from these participants. The results indicated that (a) subjects produced a greater number of more advanced (com-plete and complex) structures than lower level structures within story grammar analysis at all age levels, and (b) the most advanced structure (classic structure) was observed more often than any other structures within highpoint analysis.(Speech/Hearing/Language Pathology)
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