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. 2022 Aug 15;17(8):e0273114.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273114. eCollection 2022.

Global TALES feasibility study: Personal narratives in 10-year-old children around the world

Marleen F Westerveld  1 , Rena Lyons  2 , Nickola Wolf Nelson  3 , Kai Mei Chen  4 , Mary Claessen  5 , Sara Ferman  6 , Fernanda Dreux M Fernandes  7 , Gail T Gillon  8   9 , Khaloob Kawar  10 , Jelena Kuvač Kraljević  11 , Kakia Petinou  12 , Eleni Theodorou  12 , Tatiana Tumanova  13 , Ioannis Vogindroukas  14   15 , Carol Westby  16 ; on behalf the Global TALES Consortium
Affiliations

Global TALES feasibility study: Personal narratives in 10-year-old children around the world

Marleen F Westerveld et al. PLoS One. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Personal narratives make up more than half of children's conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into children's ability to share personal narratives is in its infancy. The current study addresses this gap in the research by developing the Global TALES protocol, a protocol comprising six scripted prompts for eliciting personal narratives in school-age children (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important). We evaluated its feasibility with 249 ten-year-old children from 10 different countries, speaking 8 different languages, and analyzed researchers' views on the process of adapting the protocol for use in their own country/language. At group-level, the protocol elicited discourse samples from all children, although individual variability was evident, with most children providing responses to all six prompts. When investigating the topics of children's personal narratives in response to the prompts, we found that children from around the world share many commonalities regarding topics of conversation. Once again individual variability was high, indicating the protocol is effective in prompting children to share their past personal experiences without forcing them to focus on one particular topic. Feedback from the participating researchers on the use of the protocol in their own countries was generally positive, although several translation issues were noted. Based on our results, we now invite clinical researchers from around the world to join us in conducting further research into this important area of practice to obtain a better understanding of the development of personal narratives from children across different languages and cultures and to begin to establish local benchmarks of performance.

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Conflict of interest statement

I declare that I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: MW declares that she has a consultancy agreement with SALT Software LLC for which she receives compensation. However, SALT Software provided no funding for the current project and had no direct influence on this work. Dr Westerveld’s consulting agreement does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The other authors declare no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Total number of utterances by country.
Indicates an outlier (more than 1 standard deviation [SD] from the mean; * outlier >2 SD from the mean; numbers refer to individual case numbers in SPSS.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Total number of words by country.
Indicates an outlier (more than 1 standard deviation [SD] from the mean; * outlier >2 SD from the mean; numbers refer to case numbers in SPSS.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Percentage of responses elicited without a scripted follow-up prompt, by country/language.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

References

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