Article

An Exploratory Study on Young Children's Spoken and Written Narratives of Personal Experience

Author

Young-Ja Lee,Geum-Gu Lee,Han-Na Oh

Information

pp. 47~61 / 2013 Vol.7 No.2

Abstract

This study investigated how young children respond when asked to create spoken and written narratives. Toexamine aspects of 5-year-olds’ spoken and written narratives about their personal experiences, the level ofnarrative, developmental stage of writing, and use of cohesive devices were analyzed. The results showed tworelationships between the spoken and written narratives. For some children, the same level was found for bothspoken and written narratives. But for other children, levels of spoken and written narratives differed. Therewere more children with a higher level of written narrative compared to spoken narrative than children with alower level of written narrative compared to spoken narrative. Further analysis of the correlations between thelevel of written narratives and developmental stage of writing showed statistical significance. Therefore, theresult of this study suggests that a child’s developmental stage of writing could affect the level of 5-year-olds’written narratives. Second, there were significant differences in 5-year-olds’ usage of cohesive devices whenrelating their personal experiences in their spoken and written narratives. The sum of conjunction andanaphoric references (i.e., cohesive devices) was higher in spoken narrative expressions than in writtennarrative expressions. In spoken narrative, children expressed de-contextualized language with cohesivedevices to give additional explanation, considering the listener who had no knowledge of the event the childwas relating. Further research about this aspect is proposed.

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