HOW EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RELATE TO NARRATIVE SKILLS

The study of communicative competence has extended its scope to investigate more than internalizing grammar, vocabulary or other linguistic devices since language development has been evaluated with competence on longer discourse units such as narratives in recent years (Kang, 2004). There are no known studies which have been conducted to examine the effect of early childhood education on narrative skills of young Turkish children. Thus, present study is aimed to fill mentioned gap in the field of early childhood education. How can we identify a good story? A substantial body of research suggests that coherence is the forefront indicator of a good story. Coherence refers to the structure of a story in which sequential events must be linked in a meaningful way (Hudson & Shapiro, 1991).

Methodology:
The sample of this study consists of 28 first grade elementary students who had early childhood education and 28 first grade elementary students who did not have early childhood education. Twenty four boys and 32 girls participate in this study and both groups include 16 girls and 12 boys. In order to prevent confusion first grade elementary students who had early childhood education represented as 'ECE' and first grade elementary students who did not have early childhood education as non-ECE in following parts.
In this study Mercer Mayer’s (1969) wordless book, Frog Where Are You?, was used to provide a comparable story-telling experience for all children. The book is a wordless picture book which contains no words and consists of 26 separate scenes presented in an order and provides referential elements for the narrative. Stories told by children were separated into clauses then; narrative length was measured by counting the number of clauses included in the stories. After that, the stories were exposed to a story grammar analysis using Labov’s (1972) story grammar models. The use of evaluative devices was measured in stories using nine subtypes of evaluative devices classified by Peterson and McCabe (1983) and adapted by Kang (2003).

Findings:
Although the t-test results for the narrative length indicated that there are no differences between the narratives of two groups, most of the narratives of non-ECE included clauses, which are the depictions of each component in the picture with no relation among them. On the other hand, stories told by the ECE are more informative, evaluative, and clear than the longer stories of non-ECE. When two groups were compared in terms of story structure, the results indicate that the stories narrated by both groups show characteristics of basic structural components suggested by Labov’s (1972) story grammar except for the Abstract and the Evaluation. Again, the Chi-square test results did not suggest that early childhood education made statistically significant difference to produced structured narratives. However, it is observed that ECE produced more informative narratives than the non-ECE. Finally, the results of the Mann-Whitney U test revealed a significant difference between the use of the evaluative devices while narrating in the scores of ECE and non-ECE. The findings ensured that the ECE were much more likely to use mental state of the character, expression of defeat of expectation, character delineation, adverbs and intensifiers in their narratives than the non-ECE.