What Story Circles Reveal about Preschool Children's Storytelling.

Emergent Literacy;Developmental Origins of Storytelling;Early Childhood Education;Lower Socioeconomic Status;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies

Flynn, Erin ElizabethPalincsar, Annemarie Sullivan ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Emergent Literacy;    Developmental Origins of Storytelling;    Early Childhood Education;    Lower Socioeconomic Status;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Educational Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/102401/erinfly_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Documented disparities in children’s facility using language emerge early and hold consequences for children’s composition and comprehension of text.Though advocates conceptualize early education contexts as ideal for intervening in language disparities, research demonstrates that the quality of language use in low income preschool settings remains too low to support language development, let alone produce the accelerated learning needed to ameliorate early disparities. In this dissertation, I explore the affordances of a small group storytelling activity as a way to engage children in linguistically demanding learning.Using systemic functional linguistics, I analyze children’s stories in terms of ideational meanings and organizational features.Then, I examine the interactive features of the storytelling activity, analyzing how children’s stories constitute rhetorical action in the larger classroom context.Results from this study indicate that children tell stories that are structured, cohesive, and marshal stress and intonation to engage listeners, emphasize parts of the text, and express an evaluative stance on events.Children’s stories vary along a continuum of complexity from incipient, single event story turns to multi-event stories.Through their stories, children negotiate aspects of their identity and the culture of the classroom. This dissertation research holds implications for research by showing story as taking multiple forms and presenting multiple sources of complexity for children to manage, a conceptualization that contrasts with research that elevates true narrative to the exclusion of other forms.By studying children’s stories in context, this study moves beyond research that considers stories only in terms of their textual instantiation.Instead, a study of stories in a small group activity shows storytelling as purposive, rhetorical action through which children mediate private intentions and meet social goals. This dissertation research informs teaching practice by describing the degrees of language complexity that characterize children’s contributions, by identifying developmental trajectories in learning to tell stories, and by recognizing how interactional factors contribute to the ability to present a cohesive story.This linguistic analysis provides the insight needed to reshape early learning contexts into laboratories for language development because it provides the rigorous evidence needed to recommend broader use of storytelling activities.