Collectivist Approaches for Supporting Young Children's Narrative Skills (original) (raw)
Related papers
Exploring Collectivist Approaches for Supporting Young Children’s Narrative Skills
Early Childhood Education Journal, 2019
Early narrative skills are predictive of later academic success, and caregivers from different cultural backgrounds use different narrative styles when supporting children's expressive language skills. Most recommendations for practice have been derived from observations of caregivers from individualistic cultural backgrounds who typically engage in an elaborative style of narrative support. Caregivers from collectivistic cultural backgrounds, however, engage in culturally unique strategies when supporting young children's narrative skills. This study explored the strategies used by caregivers from collectivistic cultural backgrounds living in the U.S. while promoting narrative skills in young children. The naturalistic conversations of forty (N = 40) children and their caregivers were observed in their home, recorded, and transcribed verbatim. The results of this study have shown that caregivers relied heavily on a participatory style of conversation when engaging young children in narratives. The results have also shown that participatory styles were effective at promoting complex narrative skills in young children. Implications for early childhood educators are discussed.
Narrative Elaboration and Participation: Two Dimensions of Maternal Elicitation Style
Child Development, 2011
This study investigated the narrative scaffolding styles of Spanish-speaking and English-speaking mothers as they engaged their preschool-aged children in family reminiscing and book sharing interactions. Specifically, the study examined the dimensions of narrative elaboration and participation in mothers' scaffolding styles across the 2 narrative tasks. Cluster analyses identified 2 styles of maternal scaffolding for each context, differing in the degree to which mothers elaborated, the manner in which they did so, and the extent to which they encouraged child participation. Findings highlight the importance of both narrative elaboration and narrative participation as defining dimensions of maternal scaffolding styles. Results are discussed in relation to variations in socialization practices and the role these practices might play in children's development.
Conversations between mothers and children from three different cultural groups were analyzed to determine culturally preferred narrative elicitation patterns. The three groups included Japanese-speaking mother-child pairs living in Japan, Japanese-speaking, mother-child pairs living in the United States, and English-speaking Canadian mother-child pairs. Comparisons of mothers from these groups found that: (1) both Japanese-speaking groups provided less evaluation of their children's discourse than the English-speaking group; (2) both Japanese-speaking groups gave more verbal acknowledgement than did the English-speaking group; and (3) Japanese mothers in the United States requested more description from their children than Japanese mothers living in Japan. At 5 years of age, Japanese-speaking children, whether living in the United States or Japan, produced about 1.2 utterances per turn, whereas English-speaking children p,:oduced about 2.1 utterances per turn. Thus, whereas English-speaking mothers allow their children to take long monological turns, and even encourage this behavior, Japanese mothers simultaneously pay considerable attention to their children's narratives and facilitate frequent exchanges. Implications of these findings are further considered in the light of improving cross-cultural understanding. (MDM)
1993
The form of Japanese children's personal narratives is distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience. Conversations between mothers in the two cultures were examined in order to account for the way in which cultural narrative style is transmitted to children. Comparison of mothers yielded the following contrasts: (1) Japanese-speaking mothers requested less description from their children than English-speaking mothers; (2) Japanese mothers gave less evaluation and showed more attention than English-speaking mothers; (3) Japanese mothers paid attention more frequently to boys than girls; and (4) at 5 years of age, Japanese children produce 1.22 utterances per turn on average, while English-speaking children produce 2.0 utterances per turn. It is suggested that the production of short narratives in Japan is understood and valued differently from such production in North
Telling the Same Story to your Child: Mothers’ versus Fathers’ Storytelling Interactions
2009
Bedtime stories are among the most popular discourse activities between parents and their children. Research shows linguistic differences between mothers and fathers telling a story. These differences are often in the amount of talk, kind of information provided, speech-acts performed, questions asked, and (non) supportive interactional style. The present study analyzes discourse characteristics in narratives of high-middle class educated Modern Hebrew-speaking mothers and fathers. Parents were recorded while telling their children the “Frog Story†– a wordless picture book relating the story of a boy and a dog in search of a lost frog. This picture book has proven to be an efficient and reliable tool in narrative development research. Our gender analysis focuses on both content and structure of the stories. From the content point of view, there were differences related to informative knowledge and affective characteristics. From the linguistic point of view, we found register differences related to the choice of a more normative and literary language as opposed to colloquial and informal language. Style differences were found to be gender-directed not only according to parents, but also to child-addressee. Parents’ narratives differed when directed to boys or girls, and a stereotyped view was clearly underlying this behavior. The findings show that parents have different expectations from boys or girls accommodating their storytelling, linguistically or emotionally to their children.
Narrative development across cultural contexts: Finding the pragmatic in parent-child reminiscing
Children learn the pragmatic conventions of storytelling during family remi- niscing. This chapter discusses differences in narrative development and nar- rative practices observed during reminiscing in two different cultural groups: children from mainstream, white, Anglo, middle-class families and Latino children and their families. Our review indicates both groups differ with respect to the way they structure, contextualize and evaluate their narratives. Different from European communities, Latinos deemphasize the chronological structur- ing of their stories. Children in both cultures learn to contextualize information within a narrative, but Latinos emphasize the contextualization of characters, usually their relatives. Both groups introduce evaluation while storytelling, through the use of different strategies. Implications of these differences for the educational context are pointed out.
Telling the Same Story to your Child: Mothers’ versus Fathers’ Storytelling Interactions
Bedtime stories are among the most popular discourse activities between parents and their children. Research shows linguistic differences between mothers and fathers telling a story. These differences are often in the amount of talk, kind of information provided, speechacts performed, questions asked, and (non) supportive interactional style. The present study analyzes discourse characteristics in narratives of high-middle class educated Modern Hebrew-speaking mothers and fathers. Parents were recorded while telling their children the "Frog Story" -a wordless picture book relating the story of a boy and a dog in search of a lost frog. This picture book has proven to be an efficient and reliable tool in narrative development research. Our gender analysis focuses on both content and structure of the stories. From the content point of view, there were differences related to informative knowledge and affective characteristics. From the linguistic point of view, we found register differences related to the choice of a more normative and literary language as opposed to colloquial and informal language. Style differences were found to be genderdirected not only according to parents, but also to childaddressee. Parents' narratives differed when directed to boys or girls, and a stereotyped view was clearly underlying this behavior. The findings show that parents have different expectations from boys or girls accommodating their storytelling, linguistically or emotionally to their children.
Parental styles of narrative elicitation: effect on children's narrative structure and content
First Language, 1992
Two contrastive studies of personal experience narration in two mother-child pairs are reported. The relationship between patterns of narrative elicitation and the children's developing narrative skill are investigated. Three sets of data were analysed: mother's utterances during mother-child elicitation, children's spontaneously provided contextual orientation in narratives elicited by a neutral researcher when the children were between 27 and 44 months of age, and the overall structure of the children's narratives at age 44 months. The two mothers differed substantially in the kinds of questions they asked: one focused on context (i.e., who, where, when, what and why), while the other emphasized event elaboration (i.e., what happened). The former's child was more likely to spontaneously include contextual orientation but showed less sophisticated plot structure. In contrast, the narratives of the second child showed better structural organization although she spontaneously included less contextual information. These results are discussed in terms of
The Development of Children's Oral Narratives Across Contexts
Research Findings: Children across cultures begin the process of becoming literate well before they begin formal schooling. The early narratives children share in conversation with others lay the foundation for various academic and nonacademic aspects of school readiness. Practice or Policy: The present review synthesizes the major work conducted on the development of oral narratives among children from diverse sociocultural backgrounds, especially those shared at home, at school, and with peers. Contemporary research is discussed in relation to the socialization practices across cultures and the role these practices might play in shaping children's narrative discourse.
2018
Quality of mothers' book sharing interactions with their children show variations at both individual and cultural levels. The narrative styles that mothers adopt during these book sharing interactions influence their children's emergent literacy skills. The current study investigated Turkish mothers' narrative styles as they narrated a wordless picture book to their 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children, and whether these narrative styles had a relation to their children's narrative comprehension. To answer these two questions, the current study consisted of two phases. In the first study, eighty-seven mothers were asked to narrate a wordless picture book to their children. Their narrative discourse was coded according to the pragmatic function and the narrative content of their utterances. As a result, two different narrative styles were identified: storytellers who make use of informative utterances that do not require their children's participation and talk about events that are within the storyline, and story builders who use interactive utterances that encourage their children's contribution and talk about both within and beyond the storyline. In the second study, forty-nine children were asked comprehension questions iv after their mothers had narrated the wordless picture book to them. Analyses revealed no significant link between mothers' narrative styles and their children's narrative comprehension skills. However, children whose mothers adopted the story builder style displayed higher receptive vocabulary competence. Findings and implications of both studies were discussed in terms of their congruence and contributions to the existing literature.