Early narrative skills in Chilean preschool: Questions scaffold the production of coherent narratives

Abstract

USING QUESTIONS TO SCAFFOLD NARRATIVE PRODUCTION 2This study examined whether or not question answering aided the construction of coherent narratives in pre-readers. Sixty Chilean preschoolers completed two tasks using a wordless picture-book: 30 children answered questions about the story and then produced a narrative using the book; 30 children completed the tasks in reverse order. Elements of coherence were assessed in both tasks, namely problem, resolution, and mental-states. The findings indicate that questions can scaffold the production of more coherent narratives. Narratives elicited after questions were judged to be more coherent than those produced before the question-answering task. In contrast, there were no differences between scores for the question answers in the different order conditions. The results are discussed regarding the interactional role of questions and the facilitative effect they have on focusing attention to the narrative task.

The Development of Narrative Discourse in French by 5 to 10 Years Old Children: Some Insights from a Conversational Interaction Method

“…Thus, the nature of the story --interpretable in terms of a misunderstanding between the characters --doesn't lead children to produce, spontaneously, more evaluative and mind-oriented narratives. The increase in coherence in the second narrative for the conversational group is in agreement with studies of interactive book-reading (e.g., Makdissi and Boisclair, 2006) or of questions-answers interaction (e.g., Silva et al 2014). They confirm also results obtained in earlier intervention studies using a very similar method (Veneziano & Hudelot, 2009;.…”

“…Finally, together with other dialogical intervention procedures (e.g., Lever and Sénéchal 2011;Makdissi and Boisclair, 2006;Silva et al, 2014), the causal-oriented conversational interaction used in our studies could also be used effectively, over a longer period of time, for remediation purposes, with SLI and autistic children (see, LeNormand, Veneziano et al, 2011, for some preliminary results with SLI children).…”

Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?

“…Similar assumptions extend to sequential images: if event understanding is universal, and images simply depict perception, sequential images depicting events should also be transparent. Researchers have thus assumed that static, drawn sequential images provide a transparent way to study action planning (Tinaz, Schendan, Schon, & Stern, 2006;Tinaz, Schendan, & Stern, 2008), theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1986;Sivaratnam, Cornish, Gray, Howlin, & Rinehart, 2012), social intelligence (Campbell & McCord, 1996), sequential reasoning (Zampini et al, 2017), temporal cognition (Boroditsky, Gaby, & Levinson, 2008), and discourse comprehension (Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990), among other cognitive abilities.…”

Talking About the Non-Literal: Internal States and Explanations in Child-Constructed Narratives

“…In some studies, the narratives obtained were conversationally co-constructed between the child and the experimenter (e.g. Eaton et al, 1999), while in others they were monologically managed (Silva et al, 2014;Veneziano & Hudelot, 2006Veneziano, 2016). Moreover, in some cases, the comparison between the narratives involved different groups of children (Silva et al, 2014), while in others the comparison implied the same children in a mixed within-subject design (e.g.…”

“…In some studies, interventions consisted in training sessions repeated frequently over a relatively long period of time (Lever & Sénéchal, 2011;Peterson, Jesso & McCabe, 1999;Whitehurst et al, 1988), while in others the intervention involved one short session in which children were questioned about the causes of the story events and/or the internal state of the characters (Eaton, Collis, & Lewis, 1999;Shiro, 2003;Silva, Strasser & Cain, 2014;Veneziano & Hudelot, 2006Veneziano, 2016). In some studies, the narratives obtained were conversationally co-constructed between the child and the experimenter (e.g.…”