Browsing by Subject "kerrontataidot"

Objectives. Narrative production demands coordination of many linguistic and cognitive skills and therefore it is considered as a multifaceted measurement tool in assessing children’s linguistic skills. Narratives can be observed at global and local levels, in other words through macro- and microstructures. Previous studies have shown contradictory results regarding the ability to distinguish children with developmental language disorder (DLD) from typically developing peers by examining the narrative macrostructures. Regarding the issue, there is a limited research data when examining Finnish as a second language. In this thesis the narrative macrostructures are examined in successive bilingual children with typical and atypical language development. The objective of this thesis is to examine qualitatively the macrostructures, especially story grammar and episodic GAO-structures of the narratives and the qualitative features appearing in above mentioned and in overall structures of the narratives. The thesis aims to clarify the differences and similarities between the typically developed children and children with DLD. Methods. The sample of this thesis was collected in 2021 as a part of the MULTILINGUA -research project. The sample consists of narrative assessments of eight successively bilingual 7- year-old children, four with a typical development and four with a suspected language disorder. The assessments were made with the Kissatarina assessment tool developed by Leena Mäkinen (2019). A theory-based approach was used in the analysis of the story grammar and furthermore the narratives were analyzed qualitatively through a data-driven approach. For the analysis of the story grammar, a scoring template was made using Stein and Glenn’s (1979) story grammar model and the information scoring in the Kissatarina. The expressions children used in the macrostructural elements in their narratives were analyzed in the light of the data, focus being on the settings, episodic structures, and the overall structures of the narratives. Results and conclusions. Overall production of the story grammar elements was poorer with children in the DLD-group in comparison to the children with typical development. In addition, the individual variation within the DLD-group was greater. Differences between the groups appeared most evident in the production of the narrative’s initiating events and expressing characters’ internal reactions and emotions, in which the children in the DLD-group showed weaker performance. For the qualitative analysis, typically developed children mainly produced more complex and coherent narratives. In all examined areas the qualitative differences between individuals were evident. The results of this thesis reveal that assessing the macrostructures in narratives might help in differentiating children with DLD from typically developing children.

Aims This descriptive review presents the current knowledge of bilingual language impaired children’s narrative skills and evaluates potential clinical applications of narrative assessment in this context. There is a growing body of research about the effects of language impairment on the narrative skills and narrative tasks are used to variable degree in the assessment of language impairment. However, the specific effects in bilingual context have only been studied very recently. The answers to research questions 1. and 2. are based on critical examination of the articles and the answer to the third question is deduced from the answers to the former two. 1. What are the effects of bilingualism on the narratives of language impaired children? 2. How does language impairment manifest in the narratives of bilingual children? 3. Is the assessment of narrative skills applicable to diagnosing language impairment in bilingual children? Methods My material consisted of seven research articles derived from the databases EBSCO academic search complete, ProQuest medline and Pubmed in december 2016 with the search query (”language impairment” OR SLI) AND child* AND bilingual* AND (narrative* OR story*). The studies were control trials focusing on narrative microstructure and macrostructure. I compared the methods and results of the studies, evaluated possible causes for different outcomes, and made conclusions about the applicability of the results. Results and conclusions 1. Bilingualism had no effect on macrostructure, but impaired microstructure to some degree. 2. Language impairment had a detrimental effect on both microstructure and macrostructure, impairing particularly the use of mental state terms. 3. Macrostructure and especially the use of mental terms are promising methods in the assessment of language impairment in bilingual children.

Tässä tutkielmassa tarkastelin kerronnan rakentumista alle kouluikäisten lasten välisissä spontaaneissa kerrontatilanteissa ja vertasin näitä vastaaviin aikuisen johdattamiin kerrontatilanteisiin. Tutkielmassa selvitin, miten nämä kerrontatilanteet ja niiden rakentuminen eroavat toisistaan. Kerrontatilanteilla tarkoitan tilanteita, joissa lapset kertovat omista tärkeistä hetkistään käyttäen apuna tilanteista otettuja kuvia. Aiemmat tutkimukset osoittivat, että kerrontaidoilla on merkittävä vaikutus lapsen kasvuun ja kehityksen. Muun muassa lapsen kuulluksi tuleminen sekä osallisuuden toteutuminen ovat yhteydessä kerrontataitoihin. Kerrontataitojen tukemisesta puhuttiin asiakirjoissa, kuten varhaiskasvatussuunnitelmissa, mutta olin kiinnostunut selvittämään, millä konkreettisilla keinoilla varhaiskasvatuksen aikuiset tukivat lasten kerrontaa. Haluan myös saada selville, miten tuki näkyi lapsen kerronnan sisällössä aikuisjohtoisilla kerrontahetkillä Aineisto kerättiin videoimalla yhden päiväkotiryhmän lasten kerrontatilanteita heidän eteistilassaan sekä aikuisjohtoisilla kerrontahetkillä. Valitsin koko aineistosta tutkimusaineistokseni ne osat, joissa esiintyi spontaania kerrontaa sekä niiden vastapariksi samoista kuvista kuvatut aikuisjohtoiset kerrontahetket. Spontaanin kerrontahetken kriteereinä pidin sitä, että kerrontatilanne alkoi lapsen aloitteesta, sen kuulijana tai vuorovaikutusparina oli vähintään yksi lapsi ja kuvan ottanut lapsi toimi kerronnan johdattelijana. Litteroin rajatun aineiston tarkasti ja keskusteluanalyysille tyypillisesti, etsin vastauksia tutkimuskysymyksiini aineiston sisältä. Tutkimuksessa selvisi, että lastenvälisten ja aikuisjohtoisten kerrontojen välillä oli eroa siinä, kuinka kerronta etenee ja kuinka laajaa se oli. Aikuisjohtoiset kerrontahetket olivat monipuolisempia, kerronta rikkaampaa ja yksityiskohtaisempaa sekä kerrontahetket pidempiä. Lasten välisissä kerrontahetkissä kerronta oli suppeampaa ja koostui yksittäisistä lausahduksista sekä muutaman virkkeen kertomuksista. Lapsen innostuksessa ja sitoutumisessa kerrontaan ei löytynyt eroja eri kerrontahetkien välillä. Aikuiset tukevat lasten kerrontaa selkeillä apukysymyksillä ja liittävät erillisiä kommentteja yhteen. Aikuiset vaikuttavat kerronnan mahdollistumiseen sillä, kuinka paljon arjessa on tilaa kertomuksille. Tulosten mukaan kerronnassa aikuisjohtoisuuden ja lapsilähtöisyyden tulisi ilmetä sopivassa tasapainossa. Lapset tarvitsevat aikuisen tukea ja ohjausta kerrontataitoja opetellessa, mutta lapsella itsellä tulisi olla valta kerronnan etenemisestä ja sisällöistä.

Objectives. Even though there have been more Finnish publications focusing on children’s narrative abilities, the knowledge around the topic is still minor. Also, the relationship between narrative abilities and other language development and later learning skills have not been studied in Finnish at all, while these skills have been associated to one another in international research. The aim of this study was to examine the narrative ability of a preschool-aged child. In addition to this, the relationship between narrative abilities and vocabulary was examined. Methods. This study used data from the LEINIKKI research project. The participants were 10 (five girls and five boys) healthy monolingual Finnish-speaking children aged between 3 years 7 months and 4 years. Children’s narrative abilities were assessed by the Cat Story. The stories were also analyzed using the story grammar rules by Stein and Glenn (1979). There were also other variables collected from the children’s stories; number of different words (type-variable), total number of words (token-variable) and the ratio between these two, type/token-ratio (TTR). Children’s vocabulary was assessed with vocabulary sections of Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence 3rd edition and LEINIKKI. The data was described and the results illustrated with descriptive statistics and visual descriptors. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was used to examine the relationships between skills. Results and conclusions. The children named characters from the picture booklet and narrated events in them, but the stories were not accurate in conveying meaning of the content and the plots were not whole. Every child’s story did still have some story grammar elements in it. The productivity of these stories, evaluated by the type- and token-variable values, and the ratio between them (TTR), had medium to large differences between different children. The children’s ability to use story grammar was observed to be positively correlated with the receptive vocabulary and TTR was shown to be negatively correlated with expressive vocabulary. More research is needed around the development of Finnish children’s narrative abilities and the connection between this and other language development and later learning skills. Knowledge of typical development is important, as it is a prerequisite for recognizing anomalous features and treating them.

Background and Objectives: In today's world, multilingualism is more the rule than the exception. Successively multilingual children from immigrant backgrounds are more likely to be referred to speech therapist diagnostic tests and receive a relatively larger amount of support measures in kindergarten and school. This is often due to insufficient exposure to the target language, in which case age-level language skills are not achieved. Studies show that it is important to support the development of the second language at an early stage, especially with a focus on vocabulary, in order to enable successively multilingual children to have sufficient language skills before entering school. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the development of narrative skills of multilingual children before and after the small group language intervention and compare their development to children who did not participate in such intervention. This thesis is part of the MULTILINGUA research project. Subjects and methods: In this thesis, a research and control group of a total of 41 children eere selected from a larger sample of the Paula-research project. The children who participated in the study were all successively multilingual children with a foreign background whose first language and language spoken at home was other than Finnish, Swedish or Sámi. The children of the research group (n = 21) participated in weekly small group activities in the kindergarten for about six months. The aim of the small group intervention was to support the development of the Finnish language. There were no similar small group intervention in the kindergartens of the control group (n = 19). The development of narrative skills was assessed using the Kissatarina -test. Narrative skills were measured twice every six months. Key Findings and Discussion: The narrative skills of both the research and control groups developed during the six-month follow-up. Looking at both groups, the increase in both the mean length of the expression and the information score of the narrative between the initial and final measurements were statistically significant. When comparing the groups, a statistically significant difference was found only in the positive development of the information score of the narrative. The higher information scores of the final measurement were 24% explained by the background variables group (study) and the sex of the child (girl). The results of the study provided indications that small group intervention supports the development of Finnish-speaking narrative skills of multilingual children. In further research, the results could be analyzed more qualitatively and compared with monolingual children.