Assessment of Preschool Narrative Skills

Abstract

The assessment of discourse skills in young children is an important responsibility facing clinicians today. Early identification of problems in discourse skills and, more specifically, narrative abilities is especially important for identifying children at risk for later learning and literacy-related difficulties. Despite this, few tools are available for assessing narrative skills in preschoolers. In this article we provide information concerning preschool narrative development in typically developing, North American, Caucasian, English-speaking children. Methods are suggested for assessing narrative skill of children with language impairment and children developing language normally. Transcripts of narratives from these children are presented, along with specific recommendations for evaluating these narratives.

Beyond Chronicity: Evaluation and Temporality in Spanish-Speaking Children's Personal Narratives

“…According to teacher reports and school records, none of the children had repeated a grade or had any sensory, intellectual, language, or learning difficulty. I interviewed each of the children in their school setting with a Spanish translation of the same elicitation procedure used by Peterson and McCabe (1983), the Conversational Map of Narratives of Real Experiences (McCabe & Rollins, 1994). After interviews were tape-recorded and completely transcribed, the four longest narratives of each child were selected for analysis (following McCabe & Rollins, 1994) for a total of 32 narratives.…”

“…Peterson and McCabe's (1983) research has highlighted sequentiality and focus on a single experience as goals that drive the narrative development of these children. These authors and colleagues have identified deviations from a sequential timeline as indicators of still being in an early stage of development for U.S. European American English-speaking children (McCabe & Rollins, 1994;Peterson & McCabe, 1983). In their model for assessing narrative skills, for instance, McCabe and Rollins (1994) identified seven hierarchical stages for U.S. European American Englishspeaking children's narrative development.…”

“…These authors and colleagues have identified deviations from a sequential timeline as indicators of still being in an early stage of development for U.S. European American English-speaking children (McCabe & Rollins, 1994;Peterson & McCabe, 1983). In their model for assessing narrative skills, for instance, McCabe and Rollins (1994) identified seven hierarchical stages for U.S. European American Englishspeaking children's narrative development. Among these seven stages, "leapfrog narratives" (i.e., nonsequential) characterize the still immature performance of These authors found that U.S. European American English-speaking children's deviations from the timeline after 6 years of age are signs of language immaturity or language pathology.…”

“…Both age groups were balanced in terms of gender. Children were interviewed and tape-recorded by the author using the Conversational Map of Narratives of Real Experiences (McCabe & Rollins, 1994) as the elicitation procedure. Narratives were transcribed using CHAT conventions (MacWhinney, 2000) and were subsequently coded for narrative components (Peterson & McCabe, 1983) and temporal organization (Genette, 1980).…”

Preschool foundations of early reading acquisition

“…Further advances in language skills are observed in the form of increasingly mature narrative skills as children progress through the early school years. The inability to tell a coherent story at school entry is a particularly good predictor of persistent language and reading disability among children with a history of delayed language development as preschoolers (28).…”