Conversation as a way to improve 5 to 10-years old children's stories

The acquisition of narrative skills is a developmental process that takes many years. Although children as young as 4-5 years can produce descriptive narratives, they have difficulties with explaining events, particularly when they involve the internal states of the characters. These explanations need that children take not only the perspective of a narrator but also that of the characters. This is even more the case when children attribute explicitly to the characters beliefs, let know that their beliefs may be false or rectify them. Can children produce more complex mind-oriented narratives after participating in conversations that solicit children's attention on the reasons of the central events in a story?.This question was investigated by presenting a sequence of five wordless pictures (the “stone story”) to 120 French-speaking children aged 5 to 10 years, divided into six age groups of 20 children each.All children were first requested to tell the experimenter the story they understood after the set of pictures, presented sequentially on a computer's screen, had faded out (first narrative). Then, for half of the children (the conversational scaffolding group), the experimenter asked questions soliciting the reasons of the key events in the story. The other half (the control group) played a memory game including the pictures of the story, devised in an earlier study. Finally, all children were asked to narrate once again the story (second narrative). The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.The analysis focused on children's explanations of events, distinguishing physical from psychological explanations, and on the expression of false beliefs and of their repairs, using both linguistic and discursive criteria to identify them.Preliminary results show that the particular story used in this research - whose central point is a misunderstanding between two characters – did not promote young children's evaluative attitude nor their ability to narrate the story by taking into account the psychological perspective of the characters. From age six on, the interaction between the experimenter and the child brought children of the conversational scaffolding group to improve the evaluative components of their second narrative. Improvements were significantly superior to those observed in the second narratives produced by the children of the control group. Results will be discuss in the light of a vygokskian developmental perspective