Özet:

Narrative skills are important because of three reasons; first, narratives are a useful tool for the development of oral language (Standler & Ward, 2005). Second, narrative language skills are closely related with children’s academic success and literacy development (Fang, 2001). Third, narratives are accepted as a part of cognitive domain since they require some degree of cognitive development such as memory, language and logical reasoning abilities (Stein & Albro, 1997). Story length, narrative structure, children’s inclusion types and frequency of evaluative devices in their narratives are outstanding dimensions of narrative. As such, the present study offers frame work to investigate children’s narrative by focusing on the story length, story grammar (Labov,1972) and evaluative function of narratives (Peterson & MaCabe, 1983 cited in Kang, 2003). The Early Childhood Curriculum prepared by the Ministry of National Education focuses on educating children who can express their ideas freely, retell story, and compose meaningful stories, creating relationships among picture, object, and events (MONE, 2012). Thus, it can be stated that on account of requirement of a good speaker, importance of narrative skills are increasing. Producing a wellstructured and viable narrative is a complex process, and there is much to know about how this process occurs. This study may help to teachers and parents how to support children to produce lengthy, coherent, and cohesive stories. Those skills are also helpful to make sense of children’s experiences as well as organizing and interpreting them.

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