title: Structural and dialectal characteristics of the fictional and personal narratives of school-age African American children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To report preliminary comparisons of developing structural and dialectal characteristics associated with fictional and personal narratives in school-age African American children.
  
  
  METHODS
  Forty-three children, Grades 2-5, generated a fictional narrative and a personal narrative in response to a wordless-book elicitation task and a story-prompt task, respectively. Narratives produced in these 2 contexts were characterized for macrostructure, microstructure, and dialect density. Differences across narrative type and grade level were examined.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Statistically significant differences between the 2 types of narratives were found for both macrostructure and microstructure but not for dialect density. There were no grade-related differences in macrostructure, microstructure, or dialect density.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The results demonstrate the complementary role of fictional and personal narratives for describing young children's narrative skills. Use of both types of narrative tasks and descriptions of both macrostructure and microstructure may be particularly useful for characterizing the narrative abilities of young school-age African American children, for whom culture-fair methods are scarce. Further study of additional dialect groups is warranted.
authors: The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. mills.298@osu.edu
authors: Monique T
authors: MT
authors: Mills
authors: Ruth V
authors: RV
authors: Watkins
authors: Julie A
authors: JA
authors: Washington
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D033262:Narration; D014481:United States
keywords: African American English; assessment; narrative
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