Oral Narratives in Preschool African American Children
Previous research has suggested that children who speak African American English (AAE) often produce oral narratives that are not consistent with school expectations. Researchers have found that storytelling abilities are reflective of later developing literacy skills. Because there is very little normative data on AAE speaking storytelling, African American children are being labeled as having language disorders, although in most cases, there are just language differences. Many language assessment tests are ignoring the topic associated storytelling styles of the African American students. As a result, there is an overrepresentation of African American students being diagnosed as having language disorders. The textless picture book, "Frog, Where are you?" (Mayer, 1969) has been used around the world in a number of studies focusing on child language development. However, there has been no research done on how African Americans respond to this textless book. Since African Americans often use the oral tradition, there is a need to develop improved assessment procedures that consider culturally and linguistically diverse children who use the oral tradition. In this study, four boys and six girls, who are typically developing AAE speakers, were compared to Berman's (1988) study of Hebrew speaking preschoolers of the same age. Berman (ibid.) created a scoring system for a previous study that she conducted, in which she analyzed the six different plot-advancing elements in the book, "Frog, Where are you?" (ibid.). For scoring purposes, each participant was awarded one point for each of the plot-advancing elements that they mentioned. In this present study, the AAE speaking children, in comparison to Berman's (ibid.) study, often gave more information in their narratives, which resulted in the AAE speakers getting higher scores. The AAE speaking preschoolers all showed storytelling styles that are consistent with the oral tradition, a style that is evident in the African American community.
School:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department:
Speech Pathology
Research Advisor:
Adele Proctor
Department of Research Advisor:
Speech and Hearing Science
Year of Publication:
2003