Poster #46 - Does Black Children’s Microstructural Performance Depend on the Genre? Comparing Fictional and Informational Discourse

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Oral narrative, or storytelling, skills are commonly used as an ecologically valid (Spencer & Petersen, 2020) and culturally-fair means (Mills, 2015) of assessing children’s complex language skills. These skills predict academic (e.g., Zanchi et al., 2020) and social well-being (Davidson et al., 2017), with enduring effects from early childhood through adolescence (e.g., Suggate et al., 2018). Oral narrative skills are typically examined in terms of the macrostructure, or the overall structural organization of the content, and the microstructure, or the sentence-level linguistic structures used to provide narrative cohesion (Justice et al., 2006).
A burgeoning body of work shows that for Black children, oral narrative skills may constitute a linguistic strength (Gardner-Neblett & Iruka, 2015). This work, however, has focused primarily on fictional discourse (e.g., Caesar & Kerins, 2020; Gardner-Neblett, 2022; Holt et al., 2021). Less is known about Black children’s nonfictional discourse relative to fictional discourse, particularly in terms of microstructural competency. To address this gap in the literature, the present study investigates microstructural competency differences between informational and fictional texts. We hypothesized that children would demonstrate greater microstructural competency in their fictional discourse, compared to their informational discourse, given young children’s more frequent exposure to fictional texts within educational settings (Duke, 2000; Robinson, 2021; Wright, 2014).
Secondary data were analyzed from a study on Black children’s language and literacy (N = 130; M age = 6.10 , SD = 0.72; N = 66 female). Children were given a fictional wordless book from the Frog series (Mayer, 1969) and an informational wordless book on spiders and asked to tell a story and pretend to read the books, respectively. Children’s discourse was audio-recorded and transcribed. Microstructural features were computed using the Computerized Language Analysis software (MacWhinney, 2000): total number of different words (NDW), the total number of words (TNW), mean length communication unit (MLCU), and complex syntax rate (CSYN). Predictors included vocabulary as measured by the PPVT (Dunn & Dunn, 2007), nonverbal cognition measured by KABC-II (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004), and dialect variation as measured by the DELV (Seymour et al., 2003).
Linear mixed-effects regression models were conducted to test the effect of genre (i.e., fictional vs. informational) on microstructural features, while controlling for covariates (e.g., age, gender, maternal education) and repeated measures of the data using random effects for each child. Results indicated that children produced discourse with greater NTW, NDW, MLCU, and CSYN when using the fictional book compared to the informational book (Table 1). Children’s nonverbal cognition positively predicted all indicators of fictional microstructural performance (Table 2). Vocabulary and age predicted informational NTW and NDW, while dialect variation predicted informational CSYN (Table 2).
Black children demonstrated greater microstructural competency in producing fictional discourse relative to informational discourse. This differential competency has implications for instructional practices and children’s academic success as children are increasingly tasked with engaging with informational texts as they progress through the educational system.

Authors

• Dulce Maria Lopez Alvarez, Wake Forest University
  Presenting Author

• Nicole Gardner-Neblett, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor