Children retelling stories and the consideration of the understanding of the listener

How do children retell stories they have heard? Particularly, do they consider the perspective of the listener when doing so? Our presentation builds upon a recent study on children’s oral storytelling. Children aged 4-5... [ view full abstract ]

How do children retell stories they have heard? Particularly, do they consider the perspective of the listener when doing so? Our presentation builds upon a recent study on children’s oral storytelling. Children aged 4-5 years in Swedish preschool have been told stories by their teacher and then asked to retell these stories to other children who have not heard them. The background to the study is the idea that we can promote children’s social reasoning through engaging them in oral storytelling (the Canadian From-3-to-3 project). Theoretically, our analysis is informed by a sociocultural perspective on communication and learning. The activities are documented with video recordings. The recordings are transcribed and analyzed according to the principles of Interaction Analysis. Focusing on whether – and if so how – children consider the understanding of the listener when telling a story. Our findings show that the children shift between speaking inside the narrative frame of the story, i.e., take on the voices of the characters of the story and bodily enact the story, on the one hand, and speaking about features of the story, on the other. We argue that this analytical distinction is critical in that the latter (i.e., talking about the story) implies the child being cognizant of the listener’s presumed understanding. The study contributes with insight about how children, through shifting from speaking within the frame of the story to meta-communicating about it, show that they are responsive to the listener’s understanding. The presentation is part of the Swedish National Research School on Communication and Relations as Foundations for Early Childhood Education (FoRFa), funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 729-2013-6848).

Key words: Storytelling, Re-telling, Interaction Analysis, preschool, understanding