Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Discipline of Speech and Language Therapy, School of Health Sciences, College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland.
PLoS One. 2022 Aug 15;17(8):e0273114. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273114. eCollection 2022.
Personal narratives make up more than half of children's conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into children's ability to share personal narratives is in its infancy. The current study addresses this gap in the research by developing the Global TALES protocol, a protocol comprising six scripted prompts for eliciting personal narratives in school-age children (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important). We evaluated its feasibility with 249 ten-year-old children from 10 different countries, speaking 8 different languages, and analyzed researchers' views on the process of adapting the protocol for use in their own country/language. At group-level, the protocol elicited discourse samples from all children, although individual variability was evident, with most children providing responses to all six prompts. When investigating the topics of children's personal narratives in response to the prompts, we found that children from around the world share many commonalities regarding topics of conversation. Once again individual variability was high, indicating the protocol is effective in prompting children to share their past personal experiences without forcing them to focus on one particular topic. Feedback from the participating researchers on the use of the protocol in their own countries was generally positive, although several translation issues were noted. Based on our results, we now invite clinical researchers from around the world to join us in conducting further research into this important area of practice to obtain a better understanding of the development of personal narratives from children across different languages and cultures and to begin to establish local benchmarks of performance.
个人叙事占儿童对话的一半以上。分享个人叙事的能力有助于建立和维持友谊，促进身心健康，支持课堂参与，以及为学业成功和职业成果奠定基础。尽管个人叙事是一种普遍的话语体裁，但跨文化和跨语言的儿童分享个人叙事能力的研究还处于起步阶段。本研究通过开发全球 TALES 方案来解决研究中的这一空白，该方案包括用于在学龄儿童中引出个人叙事的六个脚本提示（兴奋、担忧、恼怒、自豪、问题情境、重要的事情）。我们用来自 10 个不同国家、说 8 种不同语言的 249 名 10 岁儿童评估了该方案的可行性，并分析了研究人员对该方案进行改编以适用于本国/语言的看法。在群体层面上，该方案从所有儿童那里引出了话语样本，尽管存在个体差异，但大多数儿童对所有六个提示都做出了回应。当我们调查儿童对提示做出的个人叙事主题时，我们发现来自世界各地的儿童在谈话主题上有许多共同之处。再次，个体差异很大，这表明该方案有效地提示儿童分享他们过去的个人经历，而不会迫使他们关注一个特定的主题。参与研究的研究人员对该方案在本国使用的反馈总体上是积极的，尽管注意到了几个翻译问题。基于我们的结果，我们现在邀请来自世界各地的临床研究人员加入我们，进一步研究这一重要实践领域，以更好地了解来自不同语言和文化的儿童的个人叙事发展，并开始建立当地的表现基准。
