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Eight-year-olds’ construction of narratives and levels of literacy

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this study was to explore the ability of 8-year-old children to construct oral narratives from a wordless picture book, "Frog. Where Are You?" (Mayer, 1969) and to investigate whether there was a correlation between the children's narrative ability and reading comprehension. Specifically, there were two goals of this study: The first was to explore the way children globally organized their narratives in terms of plot components (I Onset, II Unfolding, and III Resolution), their narration specific events, and their methods of linguistically combining clauses, and linguistically packaging events; and to compare these characteristics to the narratives of 5-year-olds and 9-year-olds reported in Berman and Slobin (1994). The second was to attempt to correlate these characteristics with the children's performance on a reading comprehension assessment. Twelve children between the ages of 8;1.0 and 9;2.0 participated in this study, 6 of whom were in second-grade and of 6 whom were in third grade. Six of the children were part of previous narrative studies conducted at the University of British Columbia. Each child narrated the story twice, with one week between each telling, during which the children "read" the book with or to their caregiver(s). The children's reading abilities were measured using the Gates-MacGinite Reading Test (MacGinitie & MacGinitie, 1989). Results showed that with respect to the use of plot components these children's narratives were generally comparable to those of the 9-year-old children reported by Berman and Slobin. Their use of event components was proportionately higher than Berman and Slobin's 9-year-olds'. The majority of the children performed above grade level on the reading assessment, and little variation was found between reading scores. Therefore, grade level was used as an indirect measure of literacy exposure. An association was found between grade level and inclusion of plot components, as well as, the use of 'linguistically mature' methods of event packaging. No association was found between grade level and the inclusion of plot components, use of multiclause sentences, or linguistically mature methods of syntactically combining sentences.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-05-23

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8095

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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