Early narrative skills in Chilean preschool: Questions scaffold theproduction of coherent narratives

Abstract

This study examined whether or not question answering aided the construction of coherent narratives inpre-readers. Sixty Chilean preschoolers completed two tasks using a wordless picture-book: 30 childrenanswered questions about the story and then produced a narrative using the book; 30 children com-pleted the tasks in reverse order. Elements of coherence were assessed in both tasks, namely problem,resolution, and mental-states. The findings indicate that questions can scaffold the production of morecoherent narratives. Narratives elicited after questions were judged to be more coherent than those pro-duced before the question–answering task. In contrast, there were no differences between scores for thequestion answers in the different order conditions. The results are discussed regarding the interactionalrole of questions and the facilitative effect they have on focusing attention to the narrative task.