A Comparison of Children’s Narrative Expressions in Enactment and Writing

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how children use body-based enactment as a scaffold to compose written stories. We conducted a study where 17 children use a digital story authoring tool to enact and record stories as videos, then write the stories on paper while viewing their acting videos. We compared narrative structure and coherence in story enactment videos and writings and found that the structure of children’s narratives in the enacted and written forms varies significantly in terms of the idea units count. Coherence is generally higher in the enactment as well, especially for younger children. Our results imply that while story enactment scaffolds children’s imaginative narrative creation, further support in interactive authoring systems might be needed for them to translate their enacted story successfully into writing.