Successful capturing of young children's narratives: Reflections on modifying a popular tool

Contributing Author: Deeksha Prabhu

This article was written as part of the TalkTogether’s academic blog writing programme for early career researchers. 

Introduction

Narrative skills are important language skills that help children to successfully communicate their thoughts and experiences. Narrative skills are also essential for children to tell their own stories as well as to retell stories they have heard. The development of narrative expression during story telling involves the understanding of various components in a story and organizing the events to form a complete story. Rich descriptions and evocative language are only possible when a child’s expressive language skills are well developed. Such narrative skills are believed to play a crucial role in determining literacy development as well as communicative competence, which together play a role in both social and academic success [1], [2], [3]. However, what is challenging for us is to select an appropriate tool to successfully capture these narrative skills. Since every tool is developed with specific goals, they may not capture all aspects of a narration. But most tools do allow adaptations to the original guidelines, which is essential to also make the tool ecologically valid. Even though modifications interfere with the psychometric properties of an originally published tool, the advantages of modifications may override this limitation.  

A tool that has gained international prominence is the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). This tool was designed to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from an early age. MAIN has widely been used by researchers across a variety of languages, thereby enhancing our knowledge on development of narrative skills across multiple language families (Gagarina et al., 2019). In research within the TalkTogether project, we have used the MAIN to analyse the macrostructure elements of narrations in both Hindi and Kannada-speaking bi and multilingual children. If you are wondering what are macrostructure elements, these are the essential components of the story and include information about story settings, the central conflict in the story, the attempts by the protagonist to find a solution, the outcome and the emotions of the characters through these events. 

In our Kannada study we expanded the scoring scheme of MAIN by making two changes to the original. This allowed us to measure aspects of narration beyond the suggested scheme for assessment of macrostructure production.  We incorporated a higher score for productions with more elaboration of macrostructure elements and we also included the element of story characters which is not scored in the original scheme. This blog will take you through the modifications of the established MAIN protocol that allowed us to more successfully, we believe, capture young children’s narratives.

When elaborated productions demonstrate higher socio-pragmatic skills

Narrative competence is often believed to involve socio-pragmatic skills. A study by Ketelaars et al. (2015), for example, found that children with pragmatic language impairment showed narrative deficits. This and other evidence of a correlation between narrative and socio-pragmatic skills is the motivation to also capture the level of socio-pragmatic skills in our coding scheme. Thus, the first modification to the MAIN scheme was to capture elaborated productions. The ability to elaborate on story elements represents a higher level of socio-pragmatic skills. Let us discuss what is socio- pragmatics, and how it is linked to narrative skills. 

Illustrator: Tarique Aziz

In simple terms socio-pragmatics are the language skills required to effectively communicate in a given
social context. During the early stages of language development, socio-pragmatic skills also determine how effectively children are able to communicate with their peers, teachers and parents. In story telling the narrator is required to adapt the story to meet the listener’s need. That is when the socio-pragmatic skills come into the picture. A story is said to be well narrated when the narrator provides most of the information to meet the listener’s demands to fully comprehend. When a child provides explicit information about story elements, she shows an appreciation for the information a listener needs. When the child then makes explicit connections between story elements this too shows a sense of what listeners need. Together, these narrative expression skills therefore draw upon socio-pragmatic skills. Put differently, the quality of narrative expression may also have an influence on the overall communicative competence of the child, and vice versa.

Now let me take you through a few examples to better understand the scoring modifications to capture story elaboration. In MAIN, macrostructure productions are measured under the section on ‘story structure’. A score of ‘1’ is given for correct mentioning of each of the 5 elements of an episode. For the element of story setting however the highest score is '2' for correctly mentioning both place and time point but '1' if either place or time point only is mentioned. The scoring scheme provided in MAIN aims to capture the macrostructure elements irrespective of whether it is elaborated or not. Here are two examples from the MAIN manual.

Child 1:    English-Hebrew bilingual child age 5;06 

*CHI: and then somebody came. 
*CHI: and then he wanted to eat him. (Goal)

*CHI: then he got his foot. (outcome)

MAIN Manual, p.76

Child 2: Afrikaans-English bilingual child age 6;06 (p.81)

*CHI: and the fox wanted to catch the other baby goat. (Goal)
*CHI: and the fox jumped out to catch him. (Attempt)

*CHI: and the fox caught his foot. (Outcome)

MAIN Manual, p.81

In both the cases, the standard scoring in MAIN is a score of ‘1’ for each macrostructure element produced. However, when we compare the examples, child 2 has produced most of the information which makes the narrative more comprehensible for the listener than child 1’s narrative. Similarly in our studies, when datasets were analysed, we could see that a few children have briefly mentioned the elements whereas a few others tended to elaborate the macrostructure element by giving more explicit information. We wanted to capture this difference. Thus, we introduced a score of ‘2’ for those productions with more details. Put differently, while the traditional MAIN scoring scheme focuses on assessing the child’s story knowledge, this additional score would help us understand the child’s socio-pragmatic abilities along with this story knowledge. 

Here are the examples from our dataset on the Cat Story to illustrate this extended coding scheme: 

Child 1: Child age 7;03, home language Kannada, 1st grade, from Mysore city

adanna nooDbiTTu hiDiyakke hooytu.
It saw that, and went to catch it. (Initiating event and Goal)

meelgaDe hiDiyakke hoogtu.

It went up to catch. (Attempt)

Child 2: Child age 6;06, home language Kannada, 1st grade, from Mysore city

ondu kotti bandi ciTTe haaraaDi bandu nooDitu.
One cat saw a butterfly flying. (Initiating event)

aa ciTTena hiDiyal jegeditu.

It jumped to catch the butterfly. (Goal and Attempt)

Child 2 has included most of the details needed to give us as listeners a clearer picture of story events than child 1. Our modified scoring scheme would give a point of ‘2’ to child 2 as the story telling contains more explicit information. Child 1 would get a point of ‘1’ as the information is slightly unclear for the listener. We are aware, however, that more work is needed to understand the potential of this adaptation. For example, we need to understand how this scheme may help with coding for clinical populations. The coding may also have clinical implications in understanding the nature of narrative deficits and designing interventions that specifically target these deficits.

When fully depicted characters provide a more comprehensible story 

The second modification in scoring that we made was to understand how well children capture and communicate the characters in a story.

Illustrator: Joanna Davala

Why did we think it important to score children’s narrations for the mention of story characters?  Most stories involve portrayals of characters and a series of actions performed by these characters. Characters’ intentions, motivations and internal states are co-ordinated to form a complex social drama. Depiction of characters and appropriately relating it to story elements is necessary to form a comprehensible story. Hence, it is important to understand the child’s ability to clearly portray characters. Appropriate mention of the characters is also an important aspect in determining children’s level of narrative competence.

As mentioned earlier, ‘Characters’ are not scored in the original coding scheme. We believed it was important to incorporate this element as it shows children’s ability to not only identify characters as essential for listeners to understand the story, but also to relate the characters with appropriate events. This element is scored on a scale of ‘3’. A score of ‘0’ is given if the child doesn’t mention characters at all or mentions incorrectly; score of ‘1’ if any one character from the whole story is named; and a score of ‘2’ when 2 of 3 or 3 of 4 story characters are mentioned correctly using the target nouns. Here are examples to demonstrate the scoring scheme. 

Child 1: Child age 4;10, home language Kannada, Lower Kindergarten, from Bangalore city

kerege id egartata. 
This fell in the pond.

hull tintaave.
They are eating grass.

nooDtade. 
It saw.

kaDd biDti.  
It bit.

Child 2: Child age 6;05, home language Kannada, Upper Kindergarten, from Mysore city

ondu kuri baavi voLgaDe biddi hoogutu. 
One goat fell inside the well.

innondu kuri hullannu tinditittu. 
Another goat was eating grass 

ondu nari nooDitu
One fox saw.

kaage kaccibiDakke banditu. 

Crow came to bite. 

According to our coding scheme, child 2 would get a score of ‘3’ for accurately mentioning all the characters and relating the characters to appropriate story events. Child 1 has correctly mentioned the story events but has not mentioned the characters explicitly. In which case the character element is scored ‘0’. These examples clearly show individual differences in children depicting characters in their stories in order to make their narration more coherent for their listeners. 

Learning from our scoring modifications

The additional changes to the scoring scheme allowed us to get a more in-depth understanding of macrostructure productions as well as children’s wider narrative competence. Some could argue that the modifications made to the original coding system would restrict us from performing cross-linguistic analyses with other studies that strictly adhere to the original coding system. However, we think that, despite the limitations, these changes seem promising in helping  us achieve our goal of not just assessing macrostructure production, but also the socio-pragmatic aspects of narrative skills.

To conclude, most tools used for various language assessments allow us to expand and make necessary changes. All we need to do is exploit this freedom to use a tool to its best potential. 

About the Author: 

Deeksha is a research associate with the TalkTogether project, currently working at  Promise Foundation, Bangalore. She holds a master’s degree in Speech Language Pathology from Manipal University, India. 

Reference list: 

[1] Botting, N. (2002). Narrative as a tool for the assessment of linguistic and pragmatic impairments. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 18(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1191/0265659002ct224oa

[2] Ketelaars, M. P., Jansonius, K., Cuperus, J., & Verhoeven, L. (2015). Narrative competence in children with pragmatic language impairment: a longitudinal study. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 51(2), 162–173. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12195

[3] McCabe, A., & Rollins, P. R. (1994). Assessment of preschool narrative skills. American Journal of Speech-language Pathology, 3(1), 45–56. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360.0301.45