Paediatrics (RCH) - Theses
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ItemOral narrative skills of 5- to 7-year-old Aboriginal children growing up in South Australia( 2023-07)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 morphology, developmental progression of temporal cohesion skills across the total sample was similarly identified, but this did not differ significantly between age groups. Consistent with other studies of language and narrative development, findings suggest wide variation amongst children in the early years of school. Individual differences, known to exist more broadly in language development, were identified. Some variance could be explained by the impact of social determinants (mother’s employment and household income), but this requires replication with larger samples of families. Other factors (e.g., difficulties with cognition or language learning) were also considered as contributing factors to children’s narrative outcomes; however, the absence of additional developmental data limited the observations made. Additionally, differences based on observations not captured in the study-derived measure of narrative cohesion suggest children’s use of culturally-salient approaches to telling cohesive stories. Overall, this research—the first study of Aboriginal children’s storytelling in southeastern Australia and the largest of any fictional narrative study with Aboriginal children—systematically describes the variation of children’s development also observed in real-world contexts. The findings have important implications for culturally competent clinical and education practices, particularly emphasising the need to understand reasons for variability, which can potentially reduce the risk of misunderstandings and misjudgements in intercultural classroom and clinical settings. Further research, however, is needed to identify potential protective factors and vulnerabilities for Aboriginal children’s narrative development.