Parent Scaffolding and Child Contributions in a Co-constructed Narrative

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Objective: Narrative co-construction, when parents and children tell stories together, has been linked to improved language and narrative development in young children (Fivush et al., 2006; Jacobs & Ochs, 1995; Kelly & Bailey, 2013). Few studies have examined how specific adult scaffolding strategies relate to the child’s contributions within the narrative. This study examines how parent contributions to the narrative and parent scaffolding are associated with child contributions and child participation during the co-constructed narrative.
Methods: Study participants included 35 parent-child dyads (M age = 5, 51% male, 68% Hispanic, 65.7% of mothers completed some college or more, 17% spoke Spanish in their narrative interaction) from Southern California. Dyads were video recorded describing a past experience for two- minutes during a home visit in the summer after the transitional kindergarten year. Parent-child narrative interactions were transcribed verbatim using Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT; MacWhinney, 2000). Narratives were coded at the utterance level using an adapted coding scheme from the National Early Head Start Research & Evaluation Study. Parent’s utterances were coded as narrative features provide, narrative features request, prompting type (open-ended question, close-ended question, statement), scaffolding strategy (acknowledgement, expansion, repetition), and non-narrative contextualized language (discipline). Children’s utterances were coded as prompted or independent, and for narrative features provided.
Results: Correlations were conducted to investigate how parent scaffolding, open and closed-ended questions, and parent requests and parent contributions correlated with child contributions to the narrative and the child’s participation in the narrative. See Table 1. Correlations were also conducted to examine how the parent and child mean length of utterance (MLU) was associated. Parent MLU was associated with Child MLU (r = .23, p < .05). Child MLU was associated with parent use of statements (r = .47, p < .01), acknowledgement or backchanneling scaffolding (r = .35, p < .05), and close ended questions (r = -.50, p < .01).
Discussion: Parent requests for narrative features appear to successfully elicit narrative features (i.e. events, descriptions, etc.) from the child, and parent requests for narrative features were positively correlated with total child contributions. Parents who request specific narrative features can effectively scaffold children’s narrative development while co-constructing a narrative. Interestingly, parents’ provisions of narrative features were not as effective in eliciting child contributions. It is possible that parents who provide narrative features may provide less encouragement for children to participate or contribute their own ideas to the narrative. Parents who use requests in the narrative provide more opportunities for children to brainstorm ideas and experiment with language than parents who provide narrative features. Early home language interventions that include parents’ engaging in specific requests would strategically require the child’s participation and allow the child to practice using language to co-construct the narrative. Research focused on co-constructed narration has the potential to inform home, classroom and intervention practices to support early language development.

Authors

• Christyn Jackson, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Yan Jiang, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shana R Cohen, University of California, San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison Wishard Guerra, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author