Genre and evaluation in narrative development

Abstract

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.

Beyond Chronicity: Evaluation and Temporality in Spanish-Speaking Children's Personal Narratives

“…The increasing available data suggest that Spanish-speaking children tend to produce narratives that differ from other cultural/linguistic groups (Bocaz, 1989;Gutiérrez-Clellen & Heinrichs-Ramos, 1993;Gutiérrez-Clellen & Quinn, 1995;Sebastián & Slobin, 1994;Shiro, 2003). In a comparative study of narratives produced by low-income African American and Latino children (from Central America and the Caribbean), Rodino, Gimbert, Perez, and McCabe (1991) found that Latino children did not generally narrate using sequences of events but instead favored description and evaluation.…”

Narrativas orais de crianças com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem

“…The increased pause time in the storybook narrative seems to be related to cognitive and linguistic gaps, thus evidencing the gradual process of formation of concepts, lexical items and assimilation of syntactic rules for structuring the narrative speech (6,7,8,9,10,11,18). This also might be a strategy for the speaker to get more time to repair the mistakes in the narrative production or even to follow actions such as page changes (18).…”

“…With regard to spontaneous narrative, the findings were not significant. In fictitious narrative, for example, it was observed the presence of secondary elements and insertion of non-true contents, although sporadic adult intervention may occur to help make the speech coherent and fluent (7,9,11).…”

“…The study of narrative is important for the insertion of the child into the familiar, educational and social contexts (1,2,4,5). A complex network of cognitive and linguistic factors is thought to exist to structure, process, understand and share individual experiences and events interrelated by logical and chronological relationships (6,7,8,9,10,11).…”

“…By the age of 3-4 years, storytelling includes a greater number of sentences concatenated with some narrative markers (11,12). In the fictitious narrative, one can observe the presence of secondary elements and insertion of non-true facts, although adults can sporadically intervene in the child's narrative regarding speech coherence and cohesion (9,11,17).…”