Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.4 Vygotskian theory
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classified as having the same elaborative style differed in the methods they utilized for extending the topics and that these mothers had different effects on their children’s later narrative skills. Results revealed that one of the elaborative mothers focused on orientation information, while the other one emphasized temporally ordered
descriptions of actions. And one year later, the former’s child was more likely to spontaneously include contextual information in the independent narratives but showed less sophisticated plot structure. In contrast, the narratives of the latter’s child showed well-developed plots but included less orientation information.
In sum, the ways mothers talk about the past with their children have an influence on children’s later narrative performance when constructing narratives without mothers’ support.
2.4 Vygotskian theory
Vygotskian theory (1978) provides a conceptual framework for the study of the developmental process of children’s narrative skill in parent-child interactions. A fundamental concept of this theory is that interpsychological processes (i.e., social interactions) give rise to intrapsychological processes (i.e., cognitive skills). Thus, cognitive skills have their origins in social interactions with more skilled partners.
Another important concept is zone of proximal development: “the difference between the child’s actual level of development and the level of performance that the child
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achieves in collaboration with the adult” (Rieber & Carton, 1987, p.209), or in other words, the difference between the level of skill spontaneously demonstrated by children and their potential level of skill which is demonstrated only under conditions of external prompting and guidance. In addition, the provision of effective task regulation, guidance and feedback by adults is frequently termed task scaffolding.
During the acquisition of any new skill, adults scaffold children’s performance by providing the necessary structure for accomplishing the task. As the children’s level of skill develops, the adult-provided scaffolding is reduced. Thus, responsibility for carrying out the task is progressively handed over to the children as they acquire greater competence, until they have internalized the major components of the
scaffolding and are able to accomplish the task independently. This process proposed by Vygotsky has been found in the acquisition of a number of skills including memory (Paris, Newman & Jacobs, 1985) and communication skills (Bruner, 1983) – both of which are relevant to narration.
Several researchers suggested that parents have been found to scaffold children’s early narratives in ways that are consistent with Vygotskian theory (Eisenberg, 1985;
Perlmutter, 1980; Sachs, 1983). For instance, Eisenberg (1985) studied parent-child conversation with two children (1;9-2;7 and 2;0-3;2, respectively) and found that parent-child talk about the past could be classified into three successive phases: (1)
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the majority of content and structure was provided by the adult and the child primarily responded to yes/no questions; (2) yes/no questions were increasingly replaced by memory questions requiring the provision of content information in the response but that the overall narrative structure was still provided by the adult; (3) the child began to structure narratives spontaneously.
To sum up, Vygotskian theory provides an approach to explain the relationship between parental ways of co-constructing narratives with children and children’s later narrative performance. In other words, the narrative development of children begins in social interactions in which parents guide children’s participation. As children develop, the adult scaffolding diminishes and eventually children can complete a task on their own without support. In addition, children internalize the skills gained from the interaction with the parents. Therefore, this theory provides an explanatory mechanism to account for the key role parents play in fostering children’s narrative development.
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Chapter 3 Methodology 3.1 Subjects
Two Mandarin-speaking girls and their mothers participated in this study. D1 and Z were both three years and six months old at the start of this study and were followed for six months. We chose this age because 3-year-olds are able to participate in
conversations about past events but are still in the process of internalizing the necessary memory and narrative skills (Eisenberg, 1985). Both girls are from two-parents families in which both mothers are college educated. And both families live in Taipei, Taiwan. Mandarin Chinese is the two children’s mother tongue and it is the major language used in the interaction; Southern Min is sometimes spoken.
3.2 Procedure
In order to collect data on the ways in which mothers co-constructed narratives with their children, mother-child interactions were video and audio-tape recorded at the subjects’ home when children were 3;6 and were transcribed in the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcriptions) format. Mothers were asked to elicit personal experience narratives from their children as naturally as possible, and no more specific instructions were given. The length of conversations collected is 2
1 D and Z are subject codes.
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hours for each child.
In addition, in order to examine children’s abilities to construct narratives without mothers’ support, researcher-child interactions were video and audio-tape recorded at subjects’ home at three time points when the children were 3;6 (Time 1), 3;9 (Time 2), and 4;0 (Time 3). And these tapes were transcribed in the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcriptions) format. At each time point, the researcher played with the children for 1.5 hours. During the course of play, the researcher prompted personal experience narratives from the children. Examples of prompts include the following: ‘Have you ever fallen and hurt yourself? You have? Tell me about it.’ ‘What happened on your birthday? Tell me about it.’ Some of the
experiences being prompted about were provided by the parents, who listed various experiences that the children had had, and some prompts were the product of the play context. While the child narrated, the researcher refrained from prompting the child for specific sorts of information but rather provided interested encouragement by means of nonspecific prompts like ‘uh-huh’, ‘and?’, ‘and then what happened?’, or repetitions of what the child had just said. Such a procedure has been found to be successful at encouraging narration without imposing structure (Peterson & McCabe, 1983).
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3.3 Coding scheme
In the present study, a narrative was defined as an instance of talk about events removed in time and included at least two utterances on the same topic, similar to the definition of a narrative by Peterson (1990) and Umiker-Sebeok (1979). And these narratives were about specific past events, not routine occurrences.
All maternal utterances in the co-constructed narratives with the children and all children’s utterances in the narratives to the researcher were coded for conversation and narrative information. Conversation codes, which will be shown in section 3.3.1, were designed to explore mothers’ conversational styles and to explore what children contributed in researcher-child conversations. Narrative information codes, which will be presented in section 3.3.2, were designed to examine the narrative information types that mothers provided or requested from their children and to examine what narrative information types that children included in the independent narratives.
3.3.1 Conversation codes
The coding system is adapted from Reese & Fivush (1993) and Reese, Haden, &
Fivush (1993), and is developed from the actual data. There are six types, and examples from maternal utterances and children’s utterances are given for each type:
1. Elaborations:
Speakers either introduce a topic for discussion (e.g., Mother: Let’s talk
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something about seeing the dentist. or Child: When I went to see the doctor, he
gave me two stickers.) or provide new information about the topic under
discussion.
2. Repetitions:
Speakers repeat the exact content or the gist of their own previous
utterances (e.g., Mother: Did the nurse give you stickers? Mother: Did she give you stickers? or Child: The grandmother gave these candies to me. Researcher:
uh-huh. Child: The grandmother gave these candies to me.). Also included are speakers’ utterances which provide no new information (e.g., Mother: Do you remember? or Researcher: And then? Child: I don’t know.).
3. Clarification questions:
Speakers ask for clarification of what the addressee just said (e.g., Child:
Because there was a hole. Mother: What did you mean (there was) a hole? or Researcher: You said that you went to the park. Child: Huh?).
4. Evaluations:
Speakers confirm, negate, or correct the addressee’s previous utterance (e.g., Mother: Where did we go yesterday? Child: The zoo. Mother: Right. or
Researcher: You said that you have eaten the chocolates at that day? Child:
Right.).
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5. Associative talk:
Speakers’ utterances which are not specifically about the particular event under discussion but are related to the event in a tangential way, such as general knowledge talk, fantasy talk, and future talk.
6. Off-topic talk:
Speakers’ utterances which are completely unrelated to the topic under discussion (e.g., Mother: Do you want to go to the toilet? or Child: Can you help me open it?).
3.3.2 Narrative information codes
The coding system is adapted from Chang (2003) and Peterson & McCabe (1983), and is developed from the actual data. There are six types, and examples from
maternal utterances and children’s utterances are given for each type:
1. Complicating action: Utterances which refer to events or actions that
advance the narrative (e.g., Mother: Did you remember what we did that day?
or Child: Then I ate the noodles.).
2. Orientation: Utterances about descriptive or durative information which is related to who/what is involved in the narrated events and when/where the events take place (e.g., Mother: It is in Ilan where we saw dolphins. or Child:
It is uncle who bought the chocolate for us.).
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3. Evaluation: Utterances which are non-events and contain only evaluation such as descriptions of internal states (emotions, cognitions, and physical states), intentions, intensifiers, compulsions, explicit negatives, etc. (e.g., Mother: You were scared at that time, right? or Child: I was very happy.).
4. Speech: Utterances which include direct or reported character speech (e.g., Mother: The doctor said you should take the medicine. or Child: The uncle told her that she should be careful.).
5. Coda: Utterances which serve to mark an explicit conclusion (e.g., Mother:
That’s all. or Child: That’s all what I remembered.).
6. Non-narrative talk: Utterances which are completely unrelated to the narration of the story (e.g., Mother: Do you want to eat the pudding now? or Child: I want to eat the bread.). Also included are utterances which are related to the narrative in a tangential way, such as general knowledge talk, fantasy talk, and future talk.
3.3.3 Reliability
About one-third of the mothers’ data in the co-constructed narratives and one-third of the children’s data in the independent narratives to the researcher were randomly selected and then coded independently by another trained rater in
accordance with the coding schemes described earlier. The rater is also a Mandarin
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speaker. Then, Cohen’s Kappa was used to calculate the reliability of the data. The inter-coder reliability reaches 0.86, which represents a considerably high agreement between the two coders.
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Analysis of mothers’ ways of co-constructing narratives with children and analysis of children’s narrative performance in researcher-child conversations will be shown in section 4.1 and section 4.2, respectively. The effect of mothers’ ways of co-constructing narratives with children on children’s narrative performance will be presented in section 4.3.
4.1 Analysis of mothers’ ways of co-constructing narratives with children At first, we presented the number of co-constructed narratives in mother-child conversations, the number of total utterances per narrative, and the number of
utterances that the mothers and the children produced per narrative when the children were 3;6, as shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Number and length of narratives in mother-child conversations
Note. The ratios of maternal/child utterances per narrative to total utterances per narrative are given in parentheses.
Category
Utterances per narrative 28.6 33.9
Maternal utterances per narrative 18.0 (62.9%) 20.6 (60.7%) Child utterances per narrative 10.6 (37.1%) 13.3 (39.2%)
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Table 1 shows that in conversation between D’s mother and D, they
co-constructed 21 narratives, while in conversation between Z’s mother and Z, they co-constructed 16 narratives. As for the ratio of maternal utterances per narrative to total utterances per narrative, D’s mother is 62.9% and Z’s mother is 60.7%. This suggested that the two mothers produced quite similar proportion of utterances per narrative. As for the ratio of child utterances per narrative to total utterances per narrative, D is 37.1% and Z is 39.2%. This indicated that the two children were also quite similar about the proportion of utterances that they produced per narrative when they were 3;6. In addition, it is worth noting that the proportion of utterances that both mothers produced per narrative is higher than the proportion of utterances that both children produced per narrative, suggesting that mothers contributed more utterances than children did in co-constructed narratives.
In the following section, we will present the findings of the two mothers’ ways of co-constructing narrative with their children in terms of the conversational styles, which will be shown in section 4.1.1 and in terms of the narrative information types, which will be presented in section 4.1.2.
4.1.1 Conversational styles
Maternal utterances were classified into six types. The mean frequencies and distribution of utterance types per narrative are presented in Table 2.
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Table 2. Mean frequencies of maternal utterance types per narrative
Table 2 revealed that the highest mean frequency of the two mothers’ utterances was elaborations. This suggested that they often elaborated on the narrative topic when they talked about past events. Repetitions seldom occurred in the two mothers’
utterances. With regard to clarification questions and evaluations, D’s mother clarified and evaluated her child’s utterances more often than Z’s mother did. As for associative talk and off-topic talk, both mothers seldom made these kinds of utterances.
Furthermore, in order to determine the two mothers’ conversational styles on the basis of Reese, Haden, & Fivush’s (1993) classification, the ratio of elaborations to
repetitions is presented in Table 3.
Table 3. Mothers’ elaborations to repetitions ratio
Category D’s mother Z’s mother
Elaborations
Ratio of elaborations to repetitions 6.92 7.42
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Based on Reese, Haden, & Fivush’s (1993) study, if mothers used at least twice as many elaborations as repetitions, they would be classified as high-elaborative mothers; if mothers’ use of elaborations was nearly equal to the use of repetitions, they would be classified as low-elaborative mothers. As a result, according to this classification, the results in Table 3 reveal that the two mothers were both
high-elaborative mothers because the ratios of elaborations to repetitions were higher
than 2. That is, both mothers used more than twice as many elaborations as repetitions.
To sum up, on the basis of the quantity of talk that the two mothers elaborated on the topic, they could be viewed as displaying the same conversational style:
high-elaborative style. In order to gain more insight into how the two mothers
co-constructed narratives about the past with their children, we further analyzed the type of narrative information that they provided or requested from their children in the co-constructed narratives.
4.1.2 Narrative information types
The mean frequencies and standard deviations of the narrative information that were provided by or requested by the mothers per narrative are shown in Table 4.
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Table 4. Mean frequencies and standard deviations of mothers’ narrative information types per narrative
* p < .05
Note. t values refer to tests for the significance of the difference between the two mothers.
As shown in Table 4, the two mothers both frequently provided or requested information about complicating action and orientation, which were the two frequently mentioned information types. But the mean frequencies of the two narrative
information types in the two mothers’ utterances were quite different. Z’s mother specifically focused on orientation (M = 10.1), with more than twice as many as complicating action (M = 4.9). In contrast, D’s mother placed more emphasis on complicating action (M = 7.6) than on orientation (M = 5.1). Furthermore, differences between the two mothers in orientation (t = -2.07, p < 0.05) reached statistical
significance. With regard to evaluation and non-narrative talk, the two mothers sometimes provided or requested these types of narrative information. As for speech
D’s mother Z’s mother
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and coda, the occurrences of these information types were all very low in the two mothers’ utterances. In sum, Z’s mother and D’s mother emphasized different narrative information. Z’s mother focused on the orientation information of the narratives. In contrast, D’s mother, while providing or requesting some orientation information, focused on describing the actions and events in the narratives.
To sum up, the two mothers were similar in that they frequently elaborated on the narrative topic under discussion. That is, they demonstrated the style termed high-elaborative by Reese, Haden, & Fivush. But there were differences in how they
elaborated on the topic. Z’s mother was particularly concerned about orientation information. She frequently provided or requested information about the context of the narratives. In contrast, D’s mother placed more emphasis on complicating actions.
As a result, although the two mothers could be classified as having the same high-elaborative style, they differed in the type of narrative information that they
placed more emphasis on when co-constructing narratives about the past with their children.
4.2 Analysis of children’s narrative performance in researcher-child conversations
We firstly presented the number of narratives in researcher-child conversations, the number of total utterances per narrative, and the number of utterances that the
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researcher and children produced per narrative at three time points, as shown in Table 5.
Table 5. Number and length of narratives in researcher-child conversations at three time points
Note. The ratios of researcher/child utterances per narrative to total utterances per narrative are given in parentheses.
Table 5 shows that in conversations between the researcher and D/Z, the number of total utterances per narrative increased over time. In addition, the ratio of child utterances per narrative to total utterances per narrative for both children is higher than the ratio of researcher utterances per narrative to total utterances per narrative at three time points. That is, both children contributed more proportion of utterances per narrative than the researcher did at each time point. This suggested that the major narrator in researcher-child conversations was the children, not the researcher.
In the following section, we will present the findings of the two children’s Conversation between the
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narrative performance in researcher-child conversations in terms of the conversational contributions, which will be shown in section 4.2.1 and in terms of the narrative information types, which will be presented in section 4.2.2.
4.2.1 Conversational contributions
The utterances that the two children produced in the narratives when having conversations with the researcher were classified into six types. And the
conversational contributions were analyzed through the classification of utterance types. One way ANOVA was performed for each type to determine if there was significant difference in the two children’s utterance types over time. The mean
conversational contributions were analyzed through the classification of utterance types. One way ANOVA was performed for each type to determine if there was significant difference in the two children’s utterance types over time. The mean