A Comparison of Preschoolers’ Language Performance: Story Retelling vs. Video Description

Reading to children and asking for their story retellings have proven to be beneficial to their reading and speaking abilities’ developments and specifically their content recalling, comprehension, and literacydevelopment (Baker & Greene, 1997). However, there seems a gap in the related Persian studies (Bakhshandeh& Iraji, 2015) but more importantly the effect of film watching on preschoolers’ language development has not been sufficiently investigated in Persian as well. Acknowledging these gaps, the researchers investigated preschoolers’ narrative characteristics and compared their story retellings with their film descriptions abilities.Subsequently, nine Iranian preschoolers from three age groups (2.5- 4; 4- 5.5; and 5.5- 7) participated in fivesessionstory listening and five-session film watching of Shimoo picture storybook series which were each followed up by children’s narrative recounting. Data analysis of transcribed recordings, which were encoded applying Narrative Assessment Protocol (NAP), revealed more topic maintenance and longer descriptions fromlistening to books compared to watching films. Interestingly, only the eldest subjects consistently succeeded increating a similar story, which implies their greater understanding of the literacy process that can be furthercorroborated by the inclusion of story reconstruction or extension tasks in preschools’ curriculum. In addition, subjects with more educated mothers performed longer and more fluently whereas the other children performedbetter in film descriptions which could imply an effect of social class on children’s narrative and literacy skills(Silva, Ferreira, & Queiroga, 2014). The results provide general guidelines for parents and preschool teachers regarding factors affecting children’s literacy development, which should be strengthened during childbearing practices.

Keywords:

Narrative Assessment Protocol , Preschoolers , Retelling , Storytelling , and Video Description