Feasibility of Using the Global Tales Protocol to Elicit Personal Narratives in 10-year-Old Children in Ireland

Abstract

Introduction. This small-scale study explored the feasibility of the Global TALES protocol in eliciting personal narratives in typically developing monolingual Irish children, using the online Zoom platform. We investigated children’s performance on measures of productivity (total number of utterances; total number of words) and syntactic complexity (MLU in words). We also documented the topics children talked about in response to the six emotion-based prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol. Methods: Nineteen typically developing children (6 male, 13 female), aged between 10,0 and 10,11years produced personal narratives in response to the Global TALES protocol. Given COVID-19 pandemic-related public health restrictions, the language samples were elicited using Zoom. All stories were transcribed and analysed using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software. Qualitative content analysis was used to code the topics of the children’s stories. Results: Sixteen participants responded to all prompts. One participant only responded to three of the six prompts. The prompt that was least successful in eliciting response was the ‘problem’ prompt; 15.7% (n=3) of the children did not provide a response to this prompt. On average, children produced 40 utterances, although individual variability was high. On average, MLU was 8.7, ranging from 6 to 11. Children’s topics closely resembled those reported in the Global TALES feasibility study, despite the fact the current study took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. The most frequent topics were related to family (events, illnesses, relationships, siblings) and finding or fixing something. Conclusion: The Global TALES protocol was successful in eliciting personal narratives from 10 year-old Irish English-speaking children. Future larger scale studies are now needed to investigate if the results generalise to the wider Irish population with the view of creating local benchmarks of personal narrative performance.

Evaluating Children’s Personal Narrative Skills Using the Global TALES Protocol: Implications for Practice

“…The first three articles of this special issue report on the feasibility of using the Global TALES protocol with children from Iceland [5], Turkey [6], and Ireland [7]. Despite large individual variability in language productivity and semantic diversity within each language group, all three studies found that all six prompts were successful in eliciting personal narratives from most of the children.…”

“…Maviş and Yaşar-Gündüz [6] assessed ten 7-year-old and ten 10-year-old Turkish-speaking children and reported that all children produced a response to all of the prompts. Finally, Lyons et al [7] collected personal narrative samples from 19 ten-year-old English-speaking Irish children and found that the six protocol prompts were successful in eliciting stories from 84% of the children, with only one child declining to respond to three of the six prompts.…”

“…The studies included in this special issue show the protocol was also effective in eliciting personal narratives in children speaking Icelandic, Turkish, Dutch, Hindi, and Korean. Determining the global usefulness of the Global TALES protocol will require collecting and reporting information from a wide range of countries, including multiple countries where English is the primary language, such as Ireland [7], or where English is only one of many languages spoken, as there are differences in dialect, vocabulary, topics of interest, and/or pragmatics across countries, and languages within countries that may impact children's personal narrative performance.…”

“…The Global TALES protocol has been successfully administered face to face [4,8,9,11] or via Zoom [6,7,10,12]. However, some subtle differences in performance were found between the assessment conditions, particularly for the Arabic-speaking children [12], and further research is needed to better understand why the assessment condition may influence some children's performance more than others.…”