Supporting Language Diversities through Story Circles

• In Event: Strengths-Based Approaches for Examining and Supporting Narrative Development in Young Children

Abstract

Introduction
Stories are ubiquitous across cultures (Martin & Rose, 2008; Schick & Melzi, 2010), varied according to the meaning-making priorities of communities (Minami, 2002; Michaels, 2006; Cheatham & Jimenez-Silva, 2011; Champion, 2014), and pervasive in the lives of young children (Dyson & Geneshi, 1994; Nelson, 2006).
Teachers often expect children to tell topic centered, linear, temporal stories using standard American English with little recognition that this expectation is rooted in culture (García, 2011; Souto-Manning, 2013; Genishi & Dyson, 2015). Small group storytelling holds the potential to surface and center varied languages, dialects, and meaning-making patterns to aid classroom learning. To explore this potential, we ask:
What culturally-shaped meaning-making patterns are evident in the storytelling of children in multicultural, multilingual preschool classrooms?
Theory
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) considers language a social semiotic system through which children construe experience in social context (Halliday, 2006). In reoccurring social situations, language unfolds in predictable patterns, or genres. Genres are goal-oriented, reflect the meaning-making priorities of cultural communities, and consist of multiple stages (Halliday, 2006; Martin & Rose, 2008).
Study Population
Forty-four children attending lower SES preschools participated. Roughly half of the children were male (52%). They averaged 4.5 months of age (SD=5.90 months). The children reflected a number of parent-reported ethnic backgrounds: 32% European American, 25% mixed in terms of racial or ethnic heritage, 20% Arabic, 16% Latinx, 7% African American. For half of the children English was an additive language; 3% of the children used dialect features of Black English.
Methods
Over 700 stories were collected in three preschool classrooms over the course of one school year. Children in the classrooms participated in a small group, child-led storytelling activity called story circles. All story circles were audio recorded and transcribed.

All stories were analyzed using SFL (Halliday, 2006) to determine clause level ideas, story stages, and story genre patterns. All stories were analyzed in relationship to five known story genres drawn from the research literature on culturally-shaped patterns (Michaels, 2006; Martin & Rose, 2008; Cheatham & Jimenez-Silva, 2011):
Results
Children have already begun to internalize, interpret, and reproduce the meaning-making patterns of their cultural communities in their stories. In the context of an individual story circle, children told different genres of story which served as equally valued, though contrasting cultural meaning-making patterns. For instance, children told Affiliative, Topic Associating, and Observation stories, using contrasting underlying patterns of story in the service of developing shared meanings about the centrality of family. Dialogic exchanges like this show the potential of small group storytelling in multilingual, multicultural classrooms as a way to surface and leverage multiple culturally-shaped meaning-making patterns in the service of classroom learning.

Author

• Erin Elizabeth Flynn, Portland State University
  Presenting Author