Abstract:

A growing body of research has argued convincingly that children's acquisition of narrative abilities in their preschool years is an important foundation of emergent literacy (e.g., Dickinson & Tabors, 2001; McCabe & Bliss, 2003). On the macro level, through regular story sharing experience, children experience what story is – its plot, style, characterization, setting, theme, that gives them the framework to understand the story text (Phillips, 1999). More precisely, as language employed in stories is more sophisticated than everyday conversational language, stories serve as a source of higher-level language abilities, extending oral language discourses with deploying reasoning strategies and engagement in perspective-taking, both supportive for reading meaning and comprehension (Nicolopoulou et at., 2006).

Our study is focused on investigating narrative abilities of children before school entry as the predictor of later literacy performance in the early school years. Although, assessment of narrative abilities of children is a valuable outcome in its own right (e.g. it helps to distinguish between typically developing children and children with language impairment), we are interested in discovering how children respond to different assessment materials used to elicit story production. More specifically we are interested in how picture sequences representing different narrative structure assist in the process of representation and mental retrieval of story components to construct complete and coherent stories.

In our current study we focused on children from low-income families that were asked to tell stories using two picture sequences (one event-based and one problem-based type). In total, we collected stories from 53 children (24 girls and 29 boys; mean age = 6 years, 4 months). All children attended preschool at least one year, spoke official language fluently and passed school readiness tests necessary for being able to start compulsory school attendance (primary school) before the data collection.

Analyses performed on the collected data showed significant differences between stories produced depending on which type of picture sequence was used (in story productivity and story structure measures). To explain these differences analyses of visual and textual elements of the story presentation were performed to explain the interpretation potential of these elements for the story complexity. Results of the study will be presented to explore the utilization of different types of story sequences as assessment materials in early childhood education and care.

Keywords:

Early literacy, assessment of narrative abilities, story complexity.