The Effects of Two Intervention Procedures on Children's Narrative Skills

This paper presents results of two intervention procedures whose aim is to bring children to improve their narrative skills and produce more coherent and complex mind-oriented stories. Sixty children between 6;0 and 7;8 years, were presented with a sequence of five wordless pictures (the “stone story”) based on a misunderstanding among two characters. After having told the story they understood spontaneously (first narrative), the children recounted it a second time (second narrative) after one of three conditions: 1) a conversation on the causal explanations of the events and behaviors of the characters (Conversation on causes ConCau) 2) after they heard a coherent story narrated by the experimenter (Story Model Mod), or 3) after playing a Memory game with the story pictures and other similar pictures (Control Con). The children told the story again one week later (third narrative). Results show that after the ConCau and Mod conditions the overall coherence of the stories narrated by the children increase. They express more explanations of events, make greater reference to the internal states of the characters and are more numerous to express the characters' different points of view ascribing to one of them a state of false belief. The positive effects obtained immediately are maintained one week later. No significant differences are found between the ConCau and the Mod intervention procedures. Moreover, the answers provided by the children during the ConCau intervention procedure do not predict the explanations and the overall coherence of their subsequent narratives. These findings support a multidimensional socially and individually-driven account of learning. Moreover, they point to the usefulness of using intervention procedures to improve the manifestation of children's skills and to the necessity of using multiple means to evaluate children's competences.