Storytelling in Three Communities: Contextualized and Decontextualized Talk

• In Event: Parent-Child Interaction in Latin American Families: Attention to Strengths and Culturally Appropriate Methods

Abstract

Narratives are shared everyday across cultural communities. Though narrative research has been shown to be important, concerns have been raised because much of research has focused on narrative types that are more familiar to European-heritage communities. There is a need for more culturally sensitive methods, and more detailed analysis of the ways in which narratives are shared across diverse communities in order to take a strengths-based approach to understanding how all children learn from these conversations (Miller, Chen & Olivera, 2014). We studied both contextualized and decontextualized talk in book sharing. Decontextualized talk, talk that is abstract or removed from the here-and-now, has particularly strong implications for children’s language outcomes and is crucial for academic success (Dickinson & Tabors, 2011; Rowe, 2012; Uccelli et al., 2018).

In this study we investigated whether contextualized and decontextualized talk of Mexican-heritage and European-heritage parents varies during the reading of a wordless book that is culturally relevant to Mexican-heritage families. A sample of 60 children (M age = 4.4 years) shared a wordless book at home with their parents: 40 children whose parents were of Mexican descent, 20 whose parents had less than 12 years schooling, and 20 whose parents had 12 or more years of schooling, and 20 European-heritage children (with 12 or more years of schooling).

We first tested whether there were differences across groups in mothers’ contextualized talk. We found differences during mothers’ wordless book narrating, F = 14.20, p < .001, with European-heritage mothers sharing more utterances related to print knowledge (M =15.16, SD =2.03) than Mexican-heritage mothers with less than 12 years of schooling (M =7.21, SD =3.07) and Mexican-heritage mothers with 12 or more years of schooling (M =5.33, SD =1.40).
Next we examined differences in decontextualized talk, F = 21.63, p <.001, and found that Mexican-heritage mothers with less than 12 years of schooling shared more causal motivation utterances (M =15.72, SD =4.11) than European-heritage mothers (M =8.58, SD =3.55) and Mexican heritage mothers with 12 or more years of schooling (M =8.16, SD =3.22). In causal motivation talk parents made causal links between the motivations of characters and their actions in the story, or asked the child to do so. For example, “The lion was mad at the mouse for being on his back” or “The mouse is scared because the lion might eat him.”

These findings highlight differences and similarities in the types of talk children from different communities experience during narratives with their parents. While European-heritage parents focused on the contextualized print-based talk, it was Mexican-heritage parents with less than 12 years of schooling who emphasized important decontextualized talk about causal motivation. Future research should focus on the potential for causal motivation talk to promote abstract reasoning development in children, and implications for literacy in Latino children. Findings will be discussed in terms of how culturally appropriate methodological choices can lead to more ecologically valid interpretations.

Authors

• Graciela Solis, Loyola University Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Maureen A Callanan, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author