Promoting Explanations in Narratives

Abstract

Children’s skills in telling narratives are positively related to language (e.g., Cooper et al., 1992; Mallan, 1991), to reading and writing skills (e.g., Dickinson & Tabors, 2002; Reese et al., 2010), and to children’s overall school performance (Snow et al., 1998). Moreover, quality of narratives told at 5 years of age (Griffin et al., 2004), or retold at 6 years of age (Reese et al., 2010), has been shown to contribute to reading fluency and comprehension at 8 years of age. Although children are capable of explaining events and behavior in their everyday interactions (Hickling & Wellman, 2001; Veneziano, 2001) and may succeed in first order false belief tasks at 4 to 5 years (Wellman et al., 2001), explicit reference to mental or epistemic states in self-constructed narratives is rarely observed before 6 to 7 years (Peterson & Slaughter, 2006). Until 6 to 7 years of age, children provide few explanations and evaluations of events, and it is not until 8 to 9 years that the majority of children express these elements (e.g., Berman, 2004, 2009; Berman & Slobin, 1994). From the age of 8 to 9 years, children begin to spontaneously refer to the characters’ internal states to explain their behaviors and the story events (Bamberg, 1994), and it is even later that they express false beliefs that require the characters’ beliefs to be clearly differentiated from the state of the world or to talk about the different points of view of the characters about the same event (KielarTurska, 1999; Küntay & Nakamura, 2004; Veneziano & Hudelot, 2009). Given the centrality of narrative skills in children’s development, many studies have focused on promoting children’s narrative skills using different methodologies, settings, and durations of the intervention. In this study, the authors used an intervention they titled short conversational intervention (SCI). The SCI was chosen because, besides being short and simple to administer, it has three features likely to promote the inferential content of children’s narratives. First, the SCI focuses children’s attention on the causal structure of the story, stimulating them to go beyond the perceptual details present in the pictures. Second, by A newsletter dedicated to speech & language in school-age children