Page 103 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

Development of narrative ability 103 complexity. Contrary to Bonifacci et al., in the present study all scores were added up, instead of using the highest score for complexity of one of the episodes. Internal State Terms The third and last level of the macrostructure of narratives is the use of Internal State Terms (ISTs). With the use of ISTs narrators provide important information about their own awareness and understanding of the story characters’ mental states: what they know, what they value, and what they believe (Nippold, Ward-Lonergan, & Fanning, 2005). The development of the internal state language of the pupils can be measured by means of the frequency of occurrence of ISTs. The words included as ISTs were taken from the Dutch version of the MAIN with the explicit addition of “to laugh,” “to be shocked,” and “to cry” (see Table 5.6). These three terms were used often in the present data set and were explicitly added to the protocol to make sure that the two transcribers would count them as ISTs. All frequency lists generated with CLAN were checked for these terms and counted to get a total number of IST tokens in the story. Table 5.6: Internal State Term Categories and Examples (Taken from Gagarina et al., 2012). Internal State Term category Examples Perceptual state terms see, hear, feel, smell Physiological state terms Consciousness terms Emotion terms Mental verbs Linguistic verbs/ verbs of saying/ telling thirsty, hungry, tired, sore alive, awake, asleep sad, happy, angry, worried, disappointed, laugh*, cry*, to be shocked* want, think, know, forget, decide, believe, wonder, have / make a plan say, call, shout, warn, ask * These three terms are added to the examples of Gagarina et al. (2012). ISTs can be scored based on all tokens (lexical items) of ISTs the narrators used in their story. On the other hand, ISTs can also be scored by calculating only the IST elements of the episodes in the Story Structure thus: one internal response at the beginning of the episode and one at the end of the episode. Following the procedure of Gagarina (2016), the percentage of ISTs out of all the word tokens in the narrative was then calculated. Including all IST tokens in a narrative exceeds the two IST parts in the Story Structure. To illustrate this: the word “said” was counted in the present analysis as an IST even though it was uttered in part of the Goal in the following: “mother said that she had to go away in order to get some food.” Likewise, “happy” was counted in the present analysis as IST, even though it was uttered in part of the Outcome: “the happy mother returned with the food.” In the Story Structure analysis there is a limit of 6 points for ITSs. However, when all ISTs