Methods of Eliciting and Measuring Children’s Narratives

Abstract

The first step in investigating child language development is to obtain sufficient and valid speech data. Children, different from adults, have not yet reached final stage of their mental and cognitive development; thus, it is difficult to place child subjects in controlled laboratory contexts or to obtain reliable speech data in standardized testing conditions. Besides, children vary a great deal in their developmental paces, so how to choose and group the participants is critical in interpreting the data. In addition, since different tasks generate data of different types, choosing appropriate tasks to elicit most data with least external interferences plays a critical role in research design. Finally, how to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the speech data poses the ultimate challenge for researchers in the field of child language studies. This chapter describes some available data collection procedures and tasks in general, and pays a specific attention to the methods for collecting child narrative data. Then, this chapter describes available approaches for analyzing the macro and micro organizational structures of children’s narratives. Finally, this chapter presents the details of thematic progression analysis, which reflects the recent shift from pure linguistic representation of discourse to the communicative needs of children with special demands. Thematic analyses, was derived from the theme-rheme structure initiated by scholars of Plague School (e.g., Danes 1974; Fries 1983, 1995) and the functional linguistics framework proposed by Halliday and colleagues (e.g., Halliday and Hassan 1976; Halliday 1994) in the Systemic-Functional Linguistics framework. This chapter proposes a modified framework for analyzing children’s narratives with discussion of how natural narrative data can be elicited, documented, and analyzed systematically.