Dia: 27 de maig del 2024
Hora: 15.30 h
Lloc: aula 52.939 - 9a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF, i també en línia. 

Resum: 
Narrative abilities are crucial during the preschool years, as they help further develop children’s later linguistic, socio-communicative and academic performance (e.g., Demir et al., 2014; Dickinson & McCabe, 2001). Therefore, researchers have designed intervention programs for improving these skills, focusing mostly on improving narrative macrostructure skills (e.g., Spencer et al., 2015). To our knowledge, multimodality (e.g., embodied speech involving hand and bodily gestures, and facial expressions to enact stories) has not been fully integrated into these existing interventions, despite some evidence of its beneficial role in development (see Hostetter, 2011; Vilà-Giménez & Prieto, 2021, for reviews). To assess the role of multimodality, a 3-week multimodal narrative intervention program (MultiModal Narrative, MMN) was designed to train narrative macrostructure (i.e., structural elements of the narrative) as well as perspective-taking abilities (i.e., understanding characters’ perspectives and emotions) with the aid of multimodal story enactment strategies.

To test the effectiveness of the MMN intervention (and particularly the multimodal component of it) on improving preschool children’s narrative and perspective-taking abilities in a classroom context, a between-subjects pre- and post-intervention design, with 3 groups, was used. Specifically, the experimental groups (i.e., multimodal and narrative-based) received the MMN intervention, while the control group received treatment as usual. The MMN intervention consists of 9 30-minute sessions where the classroom teacher trains narrative macrostructure and perspective-taking through different strategies such as video cartoons, a storyteller, icons, and question-and-answer sequences. What differentiates the two experimental groups is that while in the narrative-based group the teacher is asked to act naturally, the teacher in the multimodal group is trained to enact the main actions and emotions of the story and is also asked to encourage the children to embody the stories. Also, the multimodal group watches the video of the storyteller embodying the stories. Participants were administered different narrative retelling tasks both at pre- and post-test to evaluate whether there was an improvement in their oral narrative skills after the intervention.

In this seminar, I will report the effects of the intervention on improving children’s 1) narrative macrostructure (i.e., talking about the different elements of the story plot), 2) narrative microstructure (i.e., total number of words, total number of different words within narrative retellings) and 3) narrative perspective-taking (i.e., talking about the feelings and perspectives of the characters), while comparing between the experimental groups to assess the effect of the multimodal component. All results will be discussed in the context of oral language instruction in preschool classrooms and practical implications for educational research and practice will be acknowledged.