Oral narrative skills of 5- to 7-year-old Aboriginal children growing up in South Australia

• Main Author: Cahir, Petrea Katrina
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Oral narratives; Storytelling; Language development; Child; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander; Indigenous; First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/340444

© 2024 Petrea Katrina Cahir Narrative discourse provides rich cultural and linguistic insights into worldviews, language use and development. This study—embedded within a prospective, longitudinal study of Aboriginal children and their families living in urban, regional and remote areas of South Australia—aimed to describe Aboriginal children’s fictional narrative development in their early school years (aged 5–7-years). Aboriginal researchers recorded children’s stories (N = 72) in response to the picture book Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969). Across the total sample, the children told stories using a diverse range of dialectal features of Aboriginal English(es), illustrating a diverse range of language repertoires. The first aim of this research was to describe the ways children organise story events and plot structure in fictional storytelling. Macrostructural elements of narratives were analysed, including plot components, goal-oriented frameworks and story event inclusion. The second aim was to describe patterns and variations in children’s use of temporal expressions (grammatical and lexical) and their functions to tell cohesive stories. Within-sample comparisons across ages and the areas where children lived (major city, regional and remote communities) were made. Drawing on maternal and primary caregiver questionnaire data, the third aim of the research was to explore relationships between the narrative abilities and maternal, social family or household factors. The study prioritised culturally-informed research processes and took a data-driven approach to analysis. Across the narrative measures, variability of skills and approaches to storytelling were apparent, but developmental patterns were also identified. Analysis of macrostructural elements of narrative samples identified a significant, positive age-related increase in skills. On average, children's stories did not differ between geographical areas (metropolitan and regional/remote). Following comprehensive, dialect-specific coding of verbal ...