Does assumed knowledgeableness cause differences in stories told by children from different cultural groups?

Abstract

Narratives play an important role in education, both as a genre which is used to test language proficiency and as a way of transmitting educational context. Therefore, it is important to have a clear idea of how children approach narrative tasks. In this study, we focused on children between 8 and 10 years of age. We investigated whether children with a Flemish background told stories in a different way from children with a non-Western background. Second, we looked into the way both groups of children adapted their stories to the assumed knowledgeableness, i.e. the communal common ground (Clark 1996) they attributed to their audience. Our study shows that children with a non-Western background did not differ greatly from children with a Flemish background in the way they told stories to an adult, but that significant differences could be found in the way they adapted their stories to a peer listener. Whereas children with a Flemish background elaborated more when telling to a peer, children with a non-Western background showed no significant adaptations. We briefly discuss some of the implications of this finding for education.