What Do Children in India Talk About? Personal Narratives of Typically Developing Hindi-Speaking Children

Abstract

<b><i>Background:</i></b> The recent development of the Global TALES Protocol provides a unique opportunity to conduct systematic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of children’s personal narratives. This protocol contains 6 scripted prompts to elicit personal narratives in school-age children about times when they experienced feeling happy/excited, worried, annoyed, proud, being in a problem situation, something important. <b><i>Objectives:</i></b> The objectives of this study were to examine the topics of the children’s narratives when they responded to the 6 prompts and draw comparisons with the topics of narratives spoken by children from 10 other countries speaking 8 other languages as described in the original feasibility paper. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We translated the Global TALES Protocol into Hindi and collected personal narratives of thirty Hindi-speaking children (aged 6–9 years), residing in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. All personal narrative samples were elicited in person and audio recorded for manual coding of the topics. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Although we observed many similarities in the topics of children’s personal narratives between this dataset and the dataset reported on in the initial feasibility study, we also documented some novel topics, such as “welcoming guests” in response to the “excited” prompt; “financial problems” in response to the “worried” prompt; “helping someone by actions or by advising someone morally” in response to the “problem” prompt; and “mishap/personal loss” and “exams” in response to the “important” prompt. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> Some of these novel topics likely reflected the Indian culture. Because our study involved a group of children who are linguistically and culturally different from previous studies using the Global TALES protocol and, at ages 6–9 years, slightly younger than the 10-year-olds in prior studies, this study adds to the evidence that the Global TALES protocol can be used to elicit personal narratives of children from diverse languages and cultures, as young as age 6.

Evaluating Children’s Personal Narrative Skills Using the Global TALES Protocol: Implications for Practice

“…The initial Global TALES feasibility study [4] found that the topics of children's personal narratives were remarkably similar across the 11 groups examined, regardless of the child's cultural or linguistic background. To further investigate the potential influence of culture on children's responses to the Global TALES protocol prompts, three studies analysed children's topical responses in more detail [10][11][12]. Westby et al [10] used an inductive content analysis approach to identify the topic and content of children's personal narratives.…”

“…Using the Hofstede cultural dimensions framework (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/countrycomparison-tool), the authors discuss some of the possible explanations for the frequency differences in topics and content of children's personal narratives. Srivastava et al [11] used the Global TALES protocol to elicit personal narratives from 30 Hindi-speaking children in India. These researchers found some novel topics as well, such as "welcoming guests," which could reflect the Indian culture.…”

“…The Global TALES protocol has been successfully administered face to face [4,8,9,11] or via Zoom [6,7,10,12]. However, some subtle differences in performance were found between the assessment conditions, particularly for the Arabic-speaking children [12], and further research is needed to better understand why the assessment condition may influence some children's performance more than others.…”

“…Most of the studies included in this special issue reported on children's structural language skills by counting the number of different words (vocabulary), the total number of words (verbal productivity), and/or the mean length of utterances (syntax) in morphemes or words [6-9, 12, 13]. One study reported on the global coherence of the children's personal narratives [9], using the Narrative Coherence Scoring Scheme [15], whereas four studies reported on the topics and themes of children's responses [5,[10][11][12]. One study investigated children's use of language to convey meaning by coding the use of evaluative devices [14].…”