Developing narrative performance of 5–6-year-old children through combined use of narrative elements in their speech

ABSTRACT This paper aims to investigate to what extent preschoolers' narrative speech can be affected by the combined use of five narrative elements: narrative framing, narrative basic structure, intertextual hero, plot subversion and image–text interaction. It presents an intervention aiming to teach these elements to an experimental group of preschoolers, while a control group followed the regular curriculum. A novel evaluation tool, P.R.O.S.E, was designed to evaluate the level of the five elements' comprehension and use and applied to both groups. To assure regularity and homogeneity, the differences in performance were evaluated by the mixed-design two-way RM-ANOVA analysis. The performance of the experimental group after the intervention confirmed that the combined use of narrative elements can lead to the production of contemporary narrative types by 5–6-year-old children. Statistical analysis showed a notable differentiation of performance after the use of combined narrative elements. The empirical observation validates practices aiming at the development of narrative skill at preschool age, such as the particular teaching intervention which showed that 5–6-year-old children are capable of combining narrative elements in their narrative speech.