Browsing by Author "Nuutinen, Nina"

The aim of this study is to describe the connections between Monilukutaitoa opitaan ilolla (MOI) -development project’s Storybook-material and children’s storytelling skills – a pilot study of such topic in the field. The research questions are: how the use of the Storybook -material I connected to children's storytelling based on story grammar model and what kind of stories children create within the sociocultural concept of story. This study is guided by the theoretical framework of developmental psychology, development of language and as well as a sociocultural view of the story. Methods. This study was carried out in a pre-school group in a city of southern Finland. A total of nine children participated in the study. The study has utilized the design of the intervention study and examines the differences between the experimental and control groups. Five children participated in the intervention carried out with the help of the Storybook -material and four children formed the control group. The data collection method was video recording of children’s free storytelling. A total of 16 stories were told by the children. Five children in the experimental group participated in the Storybook project between storytelling skills surveys. All the material was analyzed with discourse analysis and the structure of the story was analyzed with story grammar model and with Story grammar rating scale (Gardill & Jitendra, 1999). Results and conclusions. The main result of this study is that the connection between the use of the Storybook-material and children’s storytelling cannot be confirmed. The study concludes that children with deficiency in narrative skills benefit the most from the story telling exercices. The same result has occured in many previous studies. Research also shows that children occasionally refrain from displaying their narrative skills in storytelling situations and there is variation in the narrative. The children who participated in this study produced stories according to the story grammar model and the storytelling culture can be seen in children’s stories. The stories were entities with a beginning, ending, sequence of events and characters.