Structural Development of Narratives in Arabic: Task Complexity, Age, and Cultural Factors

Abstract

Purpose This study examines the effect of age and task complexity on the macrostructure of story production in preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic–speaking children. It also compares the children's production of core and complementary macrostructure story elements. Method A descriptive, cross-sectional research design was used to explore the participants' narrative skills. A total of 122 monolingual speakers of Kuwaiti Arabic (97 children and 25 adults) participated in this study. The children aged 4;0 to 7;11 (years;months) were randomly recruited from public schools across Kuwait. There were 24 four-year-olds (Kindergarten 1), 23 five-year-olds (Kindergarten 2), 23 six-year-olds (Grade 1), and 27 seven-year-olds (Grade 2). A group of adults was also included to establish a benchmark. Storytelling was elicited from all the participants using two sets of sequential pictures from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument: a one-episode story and a more complex three-episode story (Schneider et al., 2005). Across-group comparisons were conducted to explore the effect of age, story complexity, and type of macrostructure elements on story production. Results The findings revealed a progression by age in the development of story macrostructure, but there was no effect of task complexity. Within all age groups, the core macrostructure components were mastered before the complementary elements. Conclusions The results of this study confirmed that cross-linguistic narrative measures could be used in contexts that are culturally and linguistically different with minor adaptations. The piloting of two picture-based stories showed that the shorter one-episode version may be sufficient to evaluate the language development of this age group.