Screening the narrative skills of Hungarian kindergarteners by dynamic assessment

Narrative skills are prerequisites of successful school achievement and contribute to other aspects of cognitive and language development (Paul & Smith, 1993). Creating narratives requires the simultaneous activation of linguistic and cognitive abilities such as attentional engagement (van Oers, 2007). Size of vocabulary as well as expressive and receptive grammatical abilities also affect the complexity of the produced narrative. Dynamic Assessment (DA) offers a holistic picture regarding the abilities of children. After assessing both the initial and the final state, assessors calculate the gain of the learning phase (Karpov & Tzuriel, 2009). The aim of the research was to determine the effect of different interventions during the learning phase of the dynamic methods used for assessing the narrative skills of kindergarteners. Altogether, 50 Hungarian-speaking kindergarteners (age 6) participated in the research, in three groups. DA was used to measure their storytelling skills. Their first and second narratives based on a picture series were recorded and analyzed. The protocol of the DA was developed by the research team. The recorded material was analyzed statistically (SPSS 20) in relation to linguistic complexity, cohesion, and comprehension. The results proved our hypothesis: children’s narratives became more complex after both interventions, but in different ways. Facilitating questions improved all examined areas of the narratives, while the effect of a sample story was limited to cohesion and comprehension.