Fictional Accounts Interactively Produced dy Dayds of Direrent Age. A Study with Children from Urban Marginalized Populationes from Argentina

ALAM, F.; ROSEMBERG C. R.

Belfast

Congreso; ECREA Comunicación Interpersonal e Interacción Social; 2011

This study aims to analyze the structure of the fictional narratives produced autonomously by 4-year-old children, and interactively with an older child. The data consists of 40 narratives produced autonomously by 4-year-old children and 40 narratives produced interactively by the same children, this time in conjunction with a 12-year-old child. Participating children lived in urban-marginalized neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The children were given a series of images and where asked to tell the story using the images. The data was video-recorded and transcribed. Methodologies specific to conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff y Jefferson, 1974; Goodwin 1984, 1986), as well as to categories developed in previous research on narrative production and comprehension (Stein y Glenn, 1979) were used to analyze data. The results showed that the younger children produced more complete stories in their interactions with an older child than they produced in the autonomous performance situation. This difference can be attributed to the fact that in the interaction situation the older children scaffolded the younger children’s responses. It is important to note that the older children constructed the scaffolding based on what the younger children contributed to the exchange. Their interactions therefore generated a “zone of potential development” (Vygotzky, 1978) in which the younger children could produce narratives that they were not able to produce autonomously. Thus, these findings provide empirical evidence about the importance of the quality of the interaction for the child development.