The development of narrative skills in children: A systematic review

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the theoretical models that describe the oral narrative development in children and establishing which language components influence this process. To that end, we conducted a systematic review of the most recent research output on this topic (2000-2019). We analyzed 10 longitudinal studies reporting results of language and oral narrative measures during a span of at least 12 months. Those measures are metalinguistic awareness, structural language, and narrative discourse, among others. Our results indicate that the ability to tell a story is one of the best predictors of language development at early childhood education age, as well as literacy achievement at school age. We also found that previous models aiming to explain this process are scarce, often ignoring the pragmatic component of language.