Structural and Dialectal Characteristics of the Fictional and Personal Narratives of School-Age African American Children

Abstract

Purpose To report preliminary comparisons of developing structural characteristics associated with fictional and personal narratives in school-age African American children. Method Forty-three children, grades two through five, generated a fictional and a personal narrative in response to a wordless-book elicitation task and a story-prompt task, respectively. Narratives produced in these two contexts were characterized for macrostructure, microstructure, and dialect density. Differences across narrative type and grade level were examined. Results Statistically significant differences between the two types of narratives were found for both macrostructure and microstructure but not for dialect density. There were no grade-related differences in macrostructure, microstructure, or dialect density. Conclusion The results demonstrate the complementary role of fictional and personal narratives for describing young children's narrative skills. Use of both types of narrative tasks and descriptions of both macrostructure and macrostructure may be particularly useful for characterizing the narrative abilities of young school-age African American children, for whom culture-fair methods are scarce. Further study of additional dialect groups is warranted.

Narrative Performance of Gifted African American School-Aged Children From Low-Income Backgrounds

“…Nor did these children produce the same rate of AAE as gifted children. Given the recent links between dialect use and vocabulary, which suggest that children with greater narrative lexical diversity or higher scores on the EVT-2 and PPVT-4 also speak less AAE (Mills et al, 2013; Terry et al, 2013), attention to vocabulary instruction in general education classrooms may be warranted. One of the many ways that vocabulary has been effectively addressed in school-age children is through dynamic assessment (Steele & Mills, 2011).…”

“…Dialect density (DDM; Craig & Washington, 2006) was calculated to identify systematic differences in dialect production rates between children in general and gifted classrooms. Recently, DDM has been included as a variable of interest in studies narratives exploring the narratives of school-age AAE speakers (Craig, Zhang, Hensel, & Quinn; Ivy & Masterson, 2011; Mills et al, 2013; Schachter & Craig, 2013). Each narrative measure is described in turn in the following sections:…”

“…Stylistic embellishment (fantasy, suspense, conflict) is produced more in the fictional narratives of school-age African American children than in the narratives of their Latin American and European American peers (Gorman et al, 2011). Similar evaluative tools used to intensify narrative events, such as interesting modifiers, repetition, and internal state words, are produced more often in the fictional than in the personal narratives of school-age African American children (Mills et al, 2013), suggesting that fictional narrative production tasks may be most informative and culturally-fair option for examining language performance and verbal giftedness in African American children. Building on these findings from Mills et al (2013), the current study examines a different set of narrative variables, providing a more detailed analysis of the fictional narratives of gifted African American children.…”

“…In particular, because narratives are seen as culturally and ecologically valued (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Hughes, McGillivray, & Schmidek, 1997), they have been recommended as an index of language ability for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, including multilingual speakers and monolingual speakers of NMAE dialects, such as AAE (Champion, Seymour, & Camarata, 1995; Gorman, Fiestas, Peña, & Clark, 2011; Hester, 2010; Mills, Watkins, & Washington, 2013; Muñoz, Gillam, Peña, & Gulley-Fahnle, 2003).…”

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.…”