Resumo

BURBANO, Katrushka; CURIA, Victoria Clara; BORZONE, Ana María  e  TORRES-RENTERIA, Sergio. The development of narrative discourse in Ecuadorian 6-year-old children. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2022, vol.39, n.3, pp.57-74.  Epub 22-Ago-2022. ISSN 1668-7027.  http://dx.doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.3.3.

There is a consensus in the literature about the importance of adult scaffolding in the development of children's cognition and language skills (Bruner, 1986; Nelson, 1996; Vygotsky, 1978). This document analyzes first grade children's narrative development in order to verify the incidence of adult intervention and teaching methodology. For this purpose, the performance of two groups of children enrolled in first grade of school in the district of Quito was analyzed. Two different teaching methodologies were observed: while one of them exclusively adheres to the guidelines of the curriculum design proposed by the Ministry of Education, the other one incorporates strategies from the books Letters and Sounds I (Jara de Torres, 2001) and Learn and Write I (Jara de Torres, 2003) –adapted from the proposal by editorial Abeka. The narratives performed by the children at the beginning and at the end of the school year were analyzed and each performance of both groups was compared based on the amount of information retrieved and the type of information and linguistic resources used.

The stories were presented to the children in audiovisual format (steady images and recorded voice). For task administration, the children were instructed to listen and look at the story very carefully because they had to recount it to a friend or family member. The children's remarks were recorded on audio for later analysis. Descriptive and inferential statistical methods were used in order to analyze and compare the linguistic and cognitive performance in the production of stories of the two groups of children in the different evaluation. Significant differences were observed in the variables analyzed, which provides evidence about the positive incidence of dialogic reading and the teaching of story production skills in narrative development.

Differences in the performance of schools, especially in first graders, cannot be attributed to maturational factors since both groups are conformed by children of the same chronological age. Neither by the socioeconomic factors, since, in fact, group A was composed of children who attend a rural school and most of them happened to have low resources. Therefore, the significant improvement in the performance of the children of group A at the end of the school year could be attributed to the intervention of their teacher's work. It is thought that this advance in retell story skills is due to an improvement in the understanding of the basic story, however there are studies that observe that the level reached in this process does not directly affect the quality of children's narrative performance (Bustos Ibarra et al., 2014). In consequence, the improvement in the children's narrative performance of group A can be linked not only to the work carried out by the teachers with texts but also to the situations of story production involved.

Many investigations have observed that adult scaffolding during story reading has a positive effect on children's linguistic and discursive development (Sénechal, Le Fevre, Hudson & Lawson, 1996; Trabasso & Nickels, 1992; Wasik & Bond, 2001; West et al., 2021). In fact, as Wells (1988) points out in a pioneering study, while reading stories contributes to children's linguistic development, the parallel text generated by teachers through their interventions to explain vocabulary, make inferences explicit, relate events and post-reading reconstruction has shown a greater effect than just reading any kind of story aloud.

Thereupon, the results obtained in this work show the relevance not only of the teacher's texts daily reading but, mainly, of the intervention strategies and methodologies that they use to promote comprehension and textual production in the classroom.

Palavras-chave : literacy; narrative development; dialogic reading; explicit instruction; infant discourse.

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