Evaluating the Personal Narrative Skills of Monolingual Turkish-Speaking 7- and 10-Year-Old Children with Typical Development through Global TALES: A Pilot Study

Abstract

<b><i>Introduction:</i></b> Studies on personal narratives are rare in Turkey and there is no standard protocol for eliciting them. The aim of this small-scale study was to translate the Global TALES Protocol into Turkish, with cultural adaptations, and to present the results regarding its usability for two different age-groups of 7- and 10-year-old school children. We investigated narrative skills in terms of verbal productivity (number of utterances, total number of words), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance), and semantic diversity (number of different words). In addition, group comparisons were made in terms of the participants’ gender and age. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> A total of 20 children, 10 from each age-group (7;0–7;11 and 10;0–10;11) participated in the study. All children were monolingual Turkish-speaking children with typical development. Participants were recruited through personal and/or social networks. All personal narratives were gathered via online connections (Zoom). <b><i>Results:</i></b> Descriptive statistics were used to describe the children’s performance, and the analysis of group differences was made separately according to age and gender. All children produced narratives in response to the six protocol prompts. In addition, the number of children who did not require the scripted follow-up prompts was higher than those needing a scripted follow-up prompt to produce a response. No statistically significant group differences were found in terms of gender and age on any of the measurements. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> The results from this small-scale investigation showed that the translated version of the Global TALES Protocol was effective in eliciting personal narratives from Turkish-speaking children. We concluded that there is no need to change the directions or give additional guidance or prompts to the children. Future studies with larger samples are needed to confirm these findings.