Analysis of structure and coherence of children's narratives (focused on differences between girls' and boys' narratives)
Abstract
The study presented in this article investigates structure and coherence of younger school-age children's storytelling. Based on recording 50 children's narratives we confirmed A.
Nicolopoulou's conclusions that there exist substantial differences between girls' and boys' narratives. Girls prefer the so called family genre, whereas boys prefer the so called heroic-agonistic genre.
Within each of these two genres we set up narrative models used by children to structure their stories. It was shown that narratives of children who used family or heroic-agonistic genre presented, in the majority of cases, well-arranged and coherent construction and logical structuring.
We also recorded considerable number of narratives which could not be classified as either of these two genres. These narratives embodied considerable problems in structure and causal connectivity of individual sequences of the story.
The results of our study imply that these problems concern more often the boys' stories than the girls'.