Language facilitation through stories: recasting and modelling

Abstract

Past research has demonstrated that recasts can facilitate young children's language development, even when embedded into stories. A recast occurs when one sentence is immediately followed by another sentence which reiterates the meaning of the first, but changes one or more of its syntactical components. Twenty 3-and 4-year-old Head Start children participated in this study. Ten children were read a story which incorporated recasts into its 20-page text. Ten different children were read a story similar in every aspect to the recast story (length, pictures, vocabulary, and syntactical complexity) except that this story modelled forms rather than recasting them. Modelling differs from recasting in that there is no paired presentation of sentences. Elicitation tasks measured both groups' syntactic and lexical abilities before and after the story readings. Analyses of covariance, using pre-test scores as covariates, indicated no significant differences between the recasting and modelling groups. Both groups made equal language gains. A key factor in these results may be the shared meaning between communicators allowed by both recasts and models. These data suggest further research regarding educational and clinical applications of both recasting and modelling.

Topic relations in mother-child conversation

“…The frequently-observed benefit of expansions and recasts is consistent with that hypothesis (Gleitman, Newport & Gleitman 1984, Pemberton & Watkins 1987. However, that finding is not consistently replicated (Hoff-Ginsberg 1985, Scarborough & Wycoff 1986, suggesting there may be additional conditions which maternal expansions must satisfy in order to be useful to the child.…”

Joint Book Reading in the Second Year and Vocabulary Outcomes

“…University of Kansas & Brown, 1988;Neumann, Copple, & Bredekamp, 2000;Pemberton & Watkins, 1987;Senechal & Cornell, 1993;Snow & Goldfield, 1983;Strickland, 1993) have touted the importance of JBR as a vital component of a child's development. Indeed, several investigations have reported 1) gains in language or vocabulary as a function of exposure to specific words during reading (Elley, 1989;Senechal & Cornell, 1993), 2) enhancement of parent-child interactions during reading sessions (Arnold, Lonigan, Whitehurst, & Epstein, 1994;Dale, Crain-Thoreson, Notari-Syverson, & Cole, 1996;ValdezMenchaca & Whitehurst, 1992;Whitehurst et al, 1988), and 3) significant correlations between early exposure to books and later reading achievement (Scarborough, Dobrich, & Hager, 1991).…”

Clinical applications of recasting : review and theory

“…One specific aspect of environmental input which has been the focus of various naturalistic and experimental studies is RECASTING (Baker, 1982;Baker, Pemberton and Nelson, 1985;Nelson and Baker, 1986;Nelson, Carskaddon and Bonvillian, 1973;Pemberton and Watkins, 1987). Recasting is defined as a discourse adjustment through which basic semantic information is retained while syntactic structure is altered (Baker and Nelson, 1984).…”

“…(The verb phrases have yet to be, analysed.) Pemberton and Watkins (1987) initiated a second study of recasts incorporated into stories to see if even less exposure of the same kind of input could have a positive effect on language development. Ten children attending a Head Start preschool programme were read a story which had recasts embedded in it.…”

“…This paper includes a review of the literature on the effects of recasts on normal language acquisition. The rare event cognitive comparison model (Nelson, 1980;1987) is presented in an attempt to describe how a child might use recasts to help acquire language. Finally, a section on the potential use of recasts to aid in the development of language-impaired children is presented.…”