How to Listen to Young Children’s Narrative by Nursery Teachers

――Focusing on Interaction Processes of Drawings――

Abstract

This study examined how teachers use their narrative strategies by young children who is difficult to tell a story alone. We shed light on teachers’ unconscious expertise by exploring the collaboratively formed narrative processes between young children and teacher. The objectives of this study are to explore narrative strategies that story recipients use to control tellers in interactions. The subjects of this study were collected on conversation between young children and teacher about children’s drawings at nursery school. Develop- mental psychology suggests that young children cannot tell stories well, but we suggest that nursery teachers utilize narrative strategies to support young children’s storytelling. We conducted a preliminary study to observe classes for children between 0 and 5 years of age, and classes for 2- and 4-year-olds were selected for this study. The data used for analysis included interactions between teachers and children and were collected by observing these classes. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the interactional process between teachers and young children, paying attention to the teachers’ strategies for listening to the children’s narratives. As a result of the quantitative analysis, we identified five narrative strategies that teachers used to listen to the children’s stories, and as a result of the qualitative analysis, we explored how teachers control young children by using narrative strategies in interpretive practice. Nursery teachers made full use of narrative strategies for two purposes. One was to convert the 2-year-old children’s words into narrative (i.e., narrative strategy I ). Another was to convert the 2-year-old children’s narratives into stories (i.e., narrative strategy II ). The contribution of this article was two-fold: first, to investigate the story recipient’s narrative strategy, and second, to develop a new procedure for mixed methods in narrative approach.