Assessment of Structure Dependent Narrative Features in Modeled Contexts: African American and European American Children

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe similarities and differences in structure-dependent features of narratives produced by 132 typically developing African American (AA) and European American (EA) children in a modeled elicitation context, across three age groups. Participants included 132 AA and EA children matched for gender, age, and geographic region. Children were divided into young, middle, and older elementary age groups. After listening to a model narrative and answering questions about it, children were asked to generate their own narrative. Narratives were analyzed for story grammar (macrostructure), organizational style (topic centered and topic associating), dialect and cohesion (microstructure).Differences in narratives varied by age and gender but not ethnicity with the exception of the use of overt planning. EA children were more likely than AA children to include a plan in their story across all age groups. Developmental changes in narration are described for children ranging in age from 6;0 to 11;9. The use of African American English (AAE) was not associated with differences in the cohesiveness of narratives. The modeled elicitation context holds promise as a reliable way to examine narration for school-age children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Using Narrative Intervention to Accelerate Canonical Story Grammar and Complex Language Growth in Culturally Diverse Preschoolers

“…Helping diverse preschool children with and without language impairment improve their narrative language could have an even greater impact on their ability to navigate an ethnocentric, mainstream school curriculum. Such interventions should not be considered a replacement for each child's micro-or macrocultural approach to narration, which can be considerably different from what is reinforced in U.S. schools (Champion, 1998;Currenton & Justice, 2004;Gillam, Fargo, Petersen, & Clark, 2012;Gorman, Fiestas, Peña, & Clark, 2011;Heath, 1983;Mills, Watkins, & Washington, 2013;Westby, 1994). Instead, narrative language intervention should be considered a way to expose children to the mainstream narrative language dialect expected of them in the school culture, allowing them to be multidialectal and multicultural.…”

Story retelling by bilingual children with language impairments and typically developing controls

“…because, then, when, where) conjunctions, along with the literate language features, create the microstructural elements of narratives (Gillam et al . ).…”

Different Tales: The Role of Gender in the Oral Narrative–Reading Link Among African American Children

“…() found that among a sample of African American 11‐ and 12‐year‐olds, girls produced more complex narratives than did boys. Other more recent studies find no difference in the narrative production by gender among African American children (e.g., Gillam et al., ; Hester, ). The inconsistencies in these studies may reflect the differences in the ages assessed and methodologies used, but leave unanswered questions about how narratives may differ by gender among preschool African American children and the implications of any potential differences for later reading outcomes.…”

“…One way of addressing this issue is to elicit children's narratives using a structured task that focuses on a protagonist involved in a series of goal‐directed behaviors to resolve a problem as the story grammar approach is most closely aligned with this type of task. Previous studies support the use of the story grammar approach as an effective way of assessing the oral narratives of young African American children (e.g., Brown et al., ; Gillam et al., ; Price et al., ).…”