Teacher's narrativity: mediation and language in the classroom

Abstracts

OBJETIVO: construir e analisar uma experiência de formação do professor em sua narratividade e os efeitos da mesma na narratividade das crianças. MÉTODO: a amostra se constituiu de duas professoras de pré-escola, 28 alunos, 14 de cada professora sendo, um grupo experimental e o outro grupo controle, e os pais das crianças como controle ambiental. As avaliações foram feitas a partir de sessões de filmagem das professoras, coleta das narrativas das crianças e questionário sobre como desenvolviam a atividade de contar em casa. RESULTADOS: o processo de mediação fonoaudiólogo/professor, com enfoque na narrativa, provocou mudança no modo de narrar não só do professor, mas também nas categorias narrativas das crianças, demonstrando a importância de o profissional que assessore o professor em sua prática trazendo novos subsídios teóricos. CONCLUSÃO: após a realização desta pesquisa observou-se que a Experiência de Aprendizagem Mediada (EAM) e os princípios interacionistas sobre a aquisição da linguagem e o desenvolvimento narrativo foram efetivos na construção de uma experiência formativa do professor para melhorar sua narratividade e que a evolução do professor se refletiu na evolução das habilidades narrativas das crianças.

Fonoaudiologia; Linguagem; Aprendizagem

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

^ISpeech Therapist with a Degree from the Universidade Luterana do Brasil; Master's Degree in Human Communication Disorders from the Universidade Tuiuti from Paraná, Brazil

^IISpeech Therapist; Master's Degree in Human Communication Disorders from the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Santa Maria, Brazil; PhD student in the Post-Graduate Program in Human Communication Disorders from the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Santa Maria, Brazil

^IIISpeech Therapist; Professor at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Santa Maria, RS, Brazil; PhD in Linguistics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Mailing Address

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: to build and analyze an experience in the teacher's formation in his/her narrativity and the effects of it on the children's narrativity.

METHOD: the sample consisted of two pre-school teachers, 28 students, composing two groups of 14, one for each teacher, being one the experimental group and the other the control group, and the children's parents as the environmental control. Evaluations were conducted through filming sessions of the teachers, collection of children's narratives and a questionnaire about how the recounting activity was developed at home.

RESULTS: the process of pnonoaudiologist/teacher mediation, focusing on narrative, caused variation not only in the teacher's way of narrating, but also in the children's narrative categories, demonstrating the importance of a professional who can advise the teacher in his/her practice by bringing in new theoretical support.

CONCLUSION: after the development of this study, it was observed that the Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) and the interactionism principles on language acquisition and narrative development were effective in building teacher's formative experience to improve his/her narrativity and that the teacher's evolution was reflected in the development of the children's narrative skills.

Keywords: Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Language; Learning

INTRODUCTION

Narrative development is pointed out by several authors as a crucial moment in the evolution of children's oral language^1,2. Such importance is reflected in several studies in Speech Therapy about narrative development in subjects with typical language acquisition, as well as subject with atypical acquisition.

In psychology, narrative is important not only from the perspective of linguistics, but also of psychic transcendence, as many studies state that narrative has the power to assist individuals to organize and interpret their life, whether they are adults⁵ or children^6,7. It is also a consensus that children learn to narrate in an organized manner in the context of collaborative engagement with their parents⁸, and such learning is the basis for the expansion that will occur by contact with other narrative genres at home and at school⁹. For this reason, when research is focused on the narrative interactions between adults and small children, there are several studies in the educational context that involve interactions with teachers or with researchers themselves¹⁰.

Despite the importance of narrative as an aspect of language development^11-13, it is not always properly valued at school, because it may vary depending on the adopted pedagogical design¹⁴. A previous study showed that pedagogical design seems to influence the way we interact linguistically in the classroom and may or may not provide the narrative space. Greater freedom of teacher / student interaction and greater authorship in the teacher's narration were observed in a socio-constructive school than in the interactions observed in a school with a traditional teaching methodology. It should be noted that the teacher of the traditional school, worried about the feedback provided after that study, was very receptive to the study reported in this article, wishing to participate in the mediation process speech therapist/teacher, with a focus on the narrative. In addition to the desire of this teacher, the contact with the experience of some particular authors¹⁵ encouraged reflection upon the use of principles contained in theoretical propositions of education and linguistics for organizing procedures for the mediation. Similarly, another study encourages the reflection about proposals for assisting narrative development¹⁶.

In this construction, three authors were of paramount importance^1,17,18. The first one¹⁷, in the field of education, brings contributions for us to think about principles in educational interaction (Mediated Learning Experience - MLE) whose theoretical basis is socio-interactionism.

The second author¹ reports, from an interactionist perspective of language, studies of narrative development for children that are essential in school and clinical practices.

The third author¹⁸ makes the enunciation of principles arising from a successful practice as a storyteller. While this author does not assume an explicit theory of language, there was a consistency of her practice with the theoretical proposals of the two other authors.

From these considerations, the objectives of this study were to construct and analyze an experience of teacher training in narrativity and its effects on children's narrativity.

METHODS

This research was an experimental design. The sample consisted of two teachers working at the same private nursery school in Canoas, (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil). One teacher participated in this experiment (experimental teacher), while the other teacher only served as a control for the research (control teacher). Students were also controls of both teachers: 14 students of the experimental teacher and 14 students of the control teacher. Parents of these children were part of the environmental control.

The participants received an informed consent form to sign after agreeing to participate in the study. They were granted the right to confidentiality, voluntary participation and clarification at any time of the research period. After the consent had been signed, the videotaping sessions of the teachers and the collection of children's narratives from each class were scheduled. In addition to the consent form, the children's parents received a questionnaire about how they would be developing the activity of storytelling at home.

The initial videotaping of the teachers was held in the natural context of the classroom, and they had received instructions to do what they did on a regular basis. Children's narratives were initially collected with an instrument². This instrument consisted of pictures used to recall a situation that contains initial balance, imbalance and resolution, allowing, therefore, a true story to be told, according to the classification previously used in other studies^4,14.

The children were instructed to unscramble the pictures the way they wanted and make up a story. During collection, the narratives were recorded on cassette tapes and immediately transcribed. Based on the transcripts, the narratives were classified. Aspects such as temporal order and narrative logic, creativity and appropriateness to theme were observed, in addition to motivation and initiative to narrate. Since the instrument is a visual one, the narrative was limited to pragmatic aspects, such as visual sharing, but it allowed a comparison of the narratives produced before and after the intervention, and also between children's groups - Control group and Experimental group.

In addition to this instrument, we observed storytelling activities with the teacher to analyze the children's attitude towards the narrative and the teacher / student interaction, to avoid analyzing the final product, in this case, the narrative. The features observed in children's narratives covered the same typology described for the students' narratives collection in the initial and final assessments. As for the teacher, in addition to the principles of MLE, the following features were observed: intonation (if appropriate or not to the content of the story and if attractive enough to capture children's attention), body attitude (if the teacher had adopted a traditional body attitude standing in front of the children sitting at their desks, or if they had sat in a circle on the floor to enjoy a friendlier moment of storytelling), and length of the story (whether or not it was appropriate; if too slow or too fast or at the right time to keep students' attention). Such criteria followed the propositions by Dohm¹⁷ about proper storytelling techniques.

The idea of keeping track of children was to verify whether or not there was a change in the type of narrative as a result of the work developed with the teacher. Accordingly, the questionnaire with parents was also implemented to verify whether there were important differences between children's family environments. Another aspect taken into account was the possibility that the instrument might have a memory effect when applied three months later. Although some children had summarized their narratives, it was noticed that they added new elements, and improved, in some cases, the temporal order and text logic.

The work with the teachers started with a semi-structured interview and a discussion on narration and their views on language. After conducting these interviews, the initial videotaping sessions were scheduled. The recordings were analyzed based on the principles of MLE and principles considered to be important for someone to become a good storyteller, and also acquisition principles within the interactionist perspective. The main idea was to provide the experimental teacher with resources by means of texts and discussions, after the videotaping sessions, so that she could improve her narrative performance, particularly her authorship, because that was a challenging aspect during the first videotaping sessions. Different authors^10,15,16,18 formed the basis for the organization of activities and readings for the experimental teacher.

In between these two videotaping sessions, continuous observation was held in the classroom in various activities other than storytelling, in order to cast a closer look at the teacher and her students in the process of narrating.

The texts used for training the teacher were summaries prepared by the researcher from the cited authors and delivered to the experimental teacher every week. These texts were discussed in the subsequent interview. At the end of these sessions with the teacher, new collections of children's narratives and new videotaping of the control teacher were performed. The training process with the teacher in the experimental situation lasted four months from the first to the last videotaping session. The control teacher was videotaped in the same periods, but without prior training.

The analysis of the data before and after the intervention was made by outlining the principles of MLE and narrative based on the observation protocol and the evaluation protocol used in research in Africa by the University of Witwatersrand. These principles are summarized in Figure 1.

The classification adopted was based on four indices, namely:

1. Never (N) - the absence of the principle

2. Rarely (R) - less than 50% of the opportunities

3. Frequently (F) - over 50% of the opportunities

4. Always (A) - at every opportunity

Opportunities were defined as those times when the principles could be observed because of the type of activity performed. An exact and objective estimation was not possible, but the comparative analysis of the video footage shows a possibility of average analysis of the occurrence of principles from the perspective of the examiners about such principles. In this research, the examiners were the researcher and her supervisor.

This study is part of the research project "Standardization of procedures for the assessment of oral language in children aged 1 year and 5 months to 5 years: creating a protocol for speech therapy clinical assessment" approved by the advisory committee on research ethics at the Universidade Luterana do Brasil ("Lutheran University of Brazil") under number 108-2002.

After the individual analysis of the teachers, a comparison was made of the results of the children's narratives, and the questionnaires answered by teachers and parents. Therefore, there was a qualitative and also a quantitative analysis of principles and narrative performances. Data collection was held for four months, covering initial assessment, intervention with the experimental teacher and final evaluation.

RESULTS

The analysis of the first and second video footage of the control teacher showed that there were no major changes in the way this teacher tells a story. Her method was based on verbal description. The experimental teacher showed a major change in the way of telling a story. This change occurred mainly after she challenged her own practice and the new theoretical framework on narratives. As a result, the teacher started to make use of a more mediating posture, corroborating the MLE theory, in which interaction and mediation foster changes in children's development.

Figure 2 summarizes the change in frequency of each principle. It can be observed that while the control teacher showed a change of one the 34 principles analyzed (3.33%), the experimental teacher progressed on 30 of the 34 principles analyzed (88.23%), which shows that the change was the result of intervention rather than the natural evolution of the teachers.

Figure 3 and Figure 4 show categorical changes in the frequency of the principles. It is observed that, in general, the experimental teacher began to adopt MLE principles in the categories often and always, reducing the number of principles in the category few times (4 out of 34 principles analyzed).

As for how language and narrative are addressed within the family environment, it was observed that the parents of the two groups did not differ in their responses except for the greater number of parents in the control group who reported having knowledge about narrative development compared with parents in the experimental group.

Besides the difference in the control group of greater use of stories, the other results of the questionnaires from parents of both groups showed no significant differences in the way they stimulate the narrative development of their children at home.

In the analysis of children's narrative performance, it is noteworthy that there was a change, though often subtle, in 10 out of the 14 subjects. The major progress occurred in temporal order, suggesting that children acquire a clearer notion of stages and sequence, i.e. the macro-proposition of the narrative. Progress was observed, therefore, in approximately 71.42% of the children in the group of the experimental teacher. This progress is almost twice as much the one observed in the group of the control teacher. This indicates that the change in the position of the teacher as a narrator seems to have influenced the development of the children. Figure 5 summarizes this progress.

The following examples illustrate the narratives of a 6-year-old girl before and after the intervention, respectively.

6-year-old girl: primitive narrative, before intervention

He was sitting and then an animal came up, and then he pick up a stick and the animal ran away. Then the animal left and he kept waiting and a man appeared. Then he help light a fire and released.

6-year-old girl: true narrative after intervention

Once upon a time there was a boy who was sitting down and resting. And one day a wolf came and talk, and then he pick up a stick and said go away I'm afraid. He said: - Don't talk like that or else I'll get you and I'll take a sticks and hold you. And he got scared and pick the stick and went to the square. He catches and put some sticks around him and got stuck. So the wolf went away and a man came and made friends with him and begins to talk with him and lit a bonfire and stayed with him for the night. Then he start to take the stick and he sits. And then they were friends and they sat and talked and then the wolf came and arrested them again and said: Don't leave or else you will see. And he left and went away.

Regarding the qualitative aspect, progress was observed in the details given at every stage of the narrative; the narrative markers were more evident (beginning, imbalance and ending), the language used by the children resembled more closely the one used in fairy tales; there was a better temporal order (they placed the narrative in time with "once upon a time ..."); there was more detail and imagination of the feelings of the characters, a more elaborate imbalance containing greater conflict before the happy ending and, finally, there was greater creativity in general.

In the control group, there was a similar narrative production between the first and last videotaping session. Only 5 of the 14 children changed categories in their narratives. The change was both in the presentation of narrative stages, which were more evident, and in the quality of the narrative and temporal order. These data are summarized in Figure 6.

It is important to observe the greater progress of children in the experimental teacher's group not only with the product (category change in the narrative), but also the process. The children's attitude changed when they listened to stories in the classroom, because they paid more attention. It is believed that this change has happened as a result of the teacher's new style of storytelling, the preparation of the story, the initial stimulus given to the narration, the type of story chosen by the teacher, and the preparation of the environment.

Changes in the narrative categories, as previously discussed, were subtle possibly because of the short period of time available to train the teacher. However, even though the period was short, it was important because it caused changes not only in the teacher's storytelling but also in the children's narrative categories.

DISCUSSION

The pedagogical intervention made in this research allowed the analysis of several factors that contributed to changes in children's behavior towards storytelling. Regarding the changes between the first and last narrative, the narrator had greater ability to make the children involved in the story. An opposite reaction was observed between the first and the second videotaping sessions: when the teacher told the story (second session) instead of reading it (first session), she made it more appealing to children, because children feel more attracted to a story when they listen to it than when they read it¹⁷.

Extra-linguistic resources²⁰, such as the use of puppets to illustrate the characters, made the activity more attractive. Furthermore, the use of gestures, pauses and silence, made the story more lively and evoked reactions observed in the children's facial expressions. Also, preparing the children and the environment for the time of the narrative is very important in this context. This preparation was clearly observed in the last narrative of the experimental teacher. The preparation of the environment was very important, since the children would be traveling to a distant place. This expectation was very suitable for preparing and motivating the children to listen to the story. The lack of attention to the first story gave way to full fascination by the last story. Various contents of the children's life experience could also be observed in their narratives, demonstrating what many authors point out on the subjective space that opens up in the narrative process ^5-8.

Regarding the levels of progress of the narrative, the proposal^4,14 showed to be effective for the evaluation of children's productions. At the beginning of data collection, these productions showed levels similar to those found in the previous research⁴, although children in this research come from a more privileged socio-cultural environment than those of the previous study.

The data show that the determining factor for the change in the children's behavior when listening to the story was providing the teacher with resources and training; her style of storytelling occurred not only on the basis of practical tips, but also anchored in a theoretical reflection on language in classroom interaction. This showed that the advice on speech therapy at school should not take place only as tips, whatever speech aspect is addressed. What is required is that the teacher and the speech therapist hold a theoretical and practical debate about language. That would be the only way to provide a change of stance on linguistic and pedagogical principles. These results were similar to the results of another study¹⁵ which demonstrate that teacher should be assisted by other professionals in their day-by-day practice, and new theoretical background should be added. In both studies, watching the video footage with teachers was a crucial way to make them rethink their practice in the classroom. Therefore, whatever the professional involved in teacher training (speech therapist, psychologist, educator, etc.), this study demonstrates that changes are possible if the professional is a member of the school team. The effects of this study were also observed, by the teacher who received the training, in the family environment that was included in the process.

CONCLUSION

Considering the initial objectives of this study, it can be concluded that the proposed teacher education developed by the speech therapist in partnership with the teacher, based on MLE principles, knowledge about child development and storytelling techniques, was effective to promote changes in the narrative development of the experimental group when compared with the control group.

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Teachers' narrativity: mediation and language in the classroom

Isabel Maganin Chesini^I; Anelise Henrich Crestani^II; Ana Paula Ramos de Souza^III

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Aug 2013
• Date of issue
  Oct 2013

History

• Received
  14 Dec 2011
• Accepted
  29 June 2012