Parent-child-adult storytelling

Book reading appears to be a highly revered and widely practiced home and school routine within and across literate western cultures. This study examined the relationship between home practices and expected children’s production. We assumed the contribution of home literacy patterns such as storytelling to have a predictive value on the development of children’s narrative productions as one facet of children’s literacy development. To this end, we set out to investigate similarities and differences in the profile of parental narrative input and children’s narrative productions. We first looked at the structural and organizational characteristics of adult-child and child-adult narratives and the relationship between the two in terms of its narrative forms and functions. Then we analyzed the interaction during narratives to — and by- children to other adults. The participants of this study were 64 parent-child dyads recruited into three age groups. Parents were asked to tell their child a picture-book story and the children were asked to tell the same story to an adult experimenter. The stories were recorded and transcribed. The data were coded into structural and interactive categories and analyzed between parent and children productions and across the three age groups. The results showed a complex relationship between parental narrative input and child-adult output. While parental narrative input resembles child narrative input, this resemblance grows stronger as the child gets older. Yet the differences between parental and child narrative input may be motivated by the child’s linguistic, narrative and social development.