Page 44 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

44 Chapter 2 stories have their own rules and structures, which include organizational patterns representing temporal and causal information that form a narrative schema (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Labov, 1972; Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Stein & Glenn, 1979; Westby, 2012). Even though narration is a universal human activity, it must be adapted to the cultural context, the story content, and to the listener (Lindgren, 2018). Thus, in addition to the data collected about their receptive vocabulary in this study, data is also collected about the pupils’ narrative ability. 2.6.1 Narrative ability development When children start talking they start with producing a string of unrelated sentences. When they are between 2 and 3;6 years old these sentences form a series focusing on a main character or main central theme, however there is not a cause-effect relationship between the individual sentences yet. Around the age of 4 cause-effect relations emerge between the sentences and by the age of 5, most children are able to produce a story that includes both a central theme and cause-effect links between the sentences of the story (Westby, Van Dongen, & Maggart, 1989). As the child grows, especially from ages five to ten, the stories that are told become more sophisticated in their features. Children create unified plot structures, motivate the events by using internal states terms (about for example feelings of the characters), and they also include extra information to appreciate the listener’s needs for information. The stories also become more complete: they include a setting of the scene and more problem resolutions sequences. Furthermore, as narrators, children give more frequent and more complex comments on the actions as they grow older (Kemper, 1984). The work of Berman and Slobin (1994) shows that the versions of stories by older children include more explicit references to cause and effect than stories by younger children. They also include more compound time referencing and more complex theory of other minds. Table 2.1 provides an overview of how narratives generally develop from preschool into adulthood (Westby, 2012). The ability to tell a story is related to cognitive maturity, and thus depends on age. A good story depends on several abilities of the speaker: the ability to understand an underlying schema, to correctly interpret pictures, to link narrative content together, and to verbalize story content (Lindgren, 2018). Particularly among children aged 4 to 5 years, major developments occur in the use of story grammar elements such as goals, actions, and outcomes (Muñoz, Gillam, Peña, & Gulley-Faehnle, 2003; Price, Roberts, & Jackson, 2006; Fivush, Haden, & Adam, 1995). Around the age of 7, the development of narrative ability reduces (Schneider, Hayward, & Vis Dubé, 2006). Narratives of children below five years of age consist most often of events with relatively simple goal-attempt-outcome sequences (Blankenstijn & Scheper, 2003; Trabasso & Rodkin, 1994). Stories become more abbreviated and complete at the age of 5 to 6, but still become more elaborate as children grow older. Furthermore, Nakamura