Learning how to tell a good story: The development of content and language in children's telling of one tale

Abstract

This paper describes the development of explanation and its expression in the storytelling of 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children. The children were asked to tell the story contained in a picture book as they looked through it, and afterward were asked questions about the key sequences. These sequences in the children's narratives were coded as Confused, Descriptive, or Explanatory and the language was coded for several features important for establishing textual coherence. In this task, explanation appears earlier than the literature suggests. Nevertheless, in the youngest children it is limited by their comprehension of the story, while many older children do not do justice in their stories to the complexity of understanding revealed in their responses to questions. The linguistic variables each show different patterns of correlation with the cognitive measures and only low intercorrelations with one another. One stylistic feature, the inclusion of connectives other than and/then is a good predictor of explanation. However, there is evidence that it is not a straightforward lack of linguistic resources that limits the older children's achievement of explanatory narrative.