NARRATIVE COMPETENCE: A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF STORYTELLING IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

The aim of this research is to determine the characteristics of storytelling in preschool children. The study included 60 children, aged four, five and six years. The characteristics of the narration of a story on the macrolinguistic and microlinguistic plane were assessed by applying the Comic story task (Kostić, Vladisavljević & Popović, 1983).The results of the macrolinguistic structure of storytelling showed that focus in four and five-year-olds is in describing the introductory event and the activities leading to a goal. In contrast, with six-year-old children story patterns exist at a cognitive level, since the elements of the comic story are consistently described in just slightly less than half of the them.The results of the microlinguistic structure of storytelling showed that the four-year-olds stories predominantly contain simple sentences, while simple-extended and dependent-complex syntactic constructions dominate in the stories of five-year-olds. In contrast, there is a tendency in six-year-olds to use complex (consecutive, dependent) sentences. Storytelling in children develops gradually over the preschool period, so instructions for storytelling is important for all children, especially for those at risk for or with language learning impairments.