CHILDES English Nicolopoulou Corpus

Ageliki Nicolopoulou Department of Psychology (Emerita) Lehigh University agn3@lehigh.edu

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Additional references and publications based on the Nicolopoulou Narrative Corpus:

• Nicolopoulou, A. (2019). Using a storytelling/story-acting practice to promote narrative and other decontextualized language skills in disadvantaged children. In E. Veneziano & A. Nicolopoulou (Eds). Narrative, Literacy, and Other Skills: Studies in Intervention (pp. 163-184). Studies in Narrative [SiN] Series: John Benjamin Press.
• Nicolopoulou, A., Cortina, K.S., Ilgaz, H, Cates Brockmeyer, C., de Sá, A. (2015). Using a narrative- and play-based activity to promote low-income preschoolers’ oral language, emergent literacy, and social competence. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 31, 147-162. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2015.01.006
• Nicolopoulou, A., Cates Brockmeyer C., de Sá, A., & Ilgaz, H. (2014). Ch. 3: Narrative performance, peer-group culture, and narrative development in a preschool classroom. In A. Cakaite, S. Blum-Kulka, V. Aukrust, & E. Teubal (Eds.). Children’s peer talk: Learning from each other (pp. 42-62). NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Nicolopoulou, A. (2011). Children’s storytelling: Toward an interpretive and sociocultural approach. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 3, 25-48.
• Nicolopoulou, A. & Cole, M. (2010). Design experimentation as a theoretical and empirical tool for developmental pedagogical research. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 5, 61-71. [For Special Issue, “Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Pedagogy”].
• Nicolopoulou, A., Sá, A., Ilgaz, H., & Brockmeyer, C. (2010). Using the transformative power of play to educate hearts and minds: From Vygotsky to Vivian Paley and beyond. Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal, 17, 1-17. [For Special Issue, “Playworlds of Children and Adults: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Play Pedagogy”].
• Nicolopoulou, A. (2009). Rethinking character representation and its development in children’s narratives. In J. Guo et al. (Eds.) Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language: Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin (pp. 241-262). New York: Taylor & Francis.
• Nicolopoulou, A. (2008). The elementary forms of narrative coherence in young children’s storytelling. Narrative Inquiry, 18, 299-325.
• Nicolopoulou, A. (2007b). The interplay of play and narrative in children’s development: Theoretical reflections and concrete examples. In A. Göncü & S. Gaskins (Eds.) Play and Development: Evolutionary, Sociocultural, and Functional Perspectives (pp. 247-273). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Nicolopoulou, A. (1997c). Worldmaking and identity formation in children's narrative play acting. In B.D. Cox & C. Lightfoot (Eds.), Sociogenetic Perspectives on Internalization (pp. 157-187). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Nicolopoulou, A. & Richner, E. S. (2007). From actors to agents to persons: The development of character representation in young children’s narratives. Child Development, 78, 412-429.
• Nicolopoulou, A., McDowell, J., & Brockmeyer, C. (2006). Narrative play and emergent literacy: Storytelling and story-acting meet journal writing. In D. Singer, R. Golinkoff & K. Hirsh-Pasek (Eds.) Play = Learning (pp.124-144). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Nicolopoulou, A. (2002). Peer-group culture and narrative development. In S. Blum-Kulka & C.E. Snow (Eds.), Talking to Adults: The Contribution of Multiparty Discourse to Language Acquisition (pp. 117 152). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Richner, E.S., & Nicolopoulou, A. (2001). The narrative construction of differing conceptions of the person in the development of young children's social understanding. Early Education & Development, 12, 393-432.
• Nicolopoulou, A. (1996). Narrative development in social context. In D. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, J. Guo, & A. Kyratzis (Eds.), Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language: Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp (pp. 369-390). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Nicolopoulou, A., Scales, B., & Weintraub, J. (1994). Gender differences and symbolic imagination in the stories of four year olds. In A. H. Dyson & C. Genishi (Eds.), The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community (pp. 102-123). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Project Description

Overview

This corpus is based on a multiyear project aimed to collect young children’s stories told in as natural context as possible where children tell stories to their peers and not only to adult teachers or experimenters. The activity used to generate the stories is a Storytelling/Storyacting activity (STSA) that was a standard component of the curriculum in these preschool classrooms. Children had the opportunity to dictate stories to their teacher during daily free-play activities. These stories were acted out the same day by the child-author and peers during a group-time activity that involved the entire classroom (for further details, see below). The stories were neither solicited by adults nor scaffolded by a story template or adult-suggested topics or story props. Children volunteered to participate in this activity (and most of them did) and were free to choose their characters, themes, and plots – thus, creating their own spontaneous stories. A summary of the children's ages and story numbers is here .

One result of having their stories read to and dramatized for the entire class at group-time is that children told their stories not only to the adults who write them down but also to their peers. This practice allowed children to use their stories for socio-relational concerns, such as enticing other children to act in their stories by telling appealing stories they want to enact. The children often used their stories to seek or express friendship, group affiliation, or prestige, attuning the storyteller to the audience’s concerns. In composing stories, children were at times inclined to include specific characters or themes that their friends favored acting out, or that marked the clique to which they belonged, and so on (for further details, see Nicolopoulou, 1996, 1997; Nicolopoulou et al., 2014). Thus, we have demonstrated that stories generated through this practice offer a vibrant body of materials to capture several aspects of children language’s development.

In addition, what is unique about this corpus is the longitudinal characters of the stories (children told several stories over the course of the school year) but also some of these children attended the preschool class for a period of two years. Furthermore, children participated in the activity voluntarily (they were only encouraged and never coerced to do so), they told any story they wish (no topics or prompts were given to them), and the teachers intervened minimally, as I explain in more detail below. School Setting and Project History. All the stories in this corpus were collected from one elementary school (Community School) that had two preschool classes (the Purple and Yellow Nurseries) where the teachers had been using this STSA classroom activity for several years and prior to my observations and data collection. (The name of the school and of the classrooms are pseudonyms.) This school was in a small college-town with several colleges around. The school served the local community of mainly middle-class parents who were professionals or academics. Some of the children were in the classrooms for two years, and if so, this is noted in the corpus.

School Setting and Project History

All the stories in this corpus were collected from one elementary school (Community School) that had two preschool classes (the Purple [MP] and Yellow Nurseries [MY]) where the teachers had been using this STSA classroom activity for several years and prior to my observations and data collection. (The name of the school and of the classrooms are pseudonyms.) This school was in a small college-town with several higher education institutions around the area. The school served the local community of mainly middle-class parents who were professionals or academics. Some of the children were in the classrooms for two years, and if so, this is noted in the corpus.

The impetus and guidelines for this activity came from the teacher/scholar Vivian Paley (1986, 1990), and it dovetailed nicely with the Froebel play philosophy operating in these classrooms. The teachers’ goal in using this activity daily in their classrooms was to provide an opportunity for the children to tell their own stories that they were going to dramatize later that day with their friends. For this reason, the teachers did not guide or correct the child’s language, grammar, narrative structure, or content during the activity. They believed that such development would gradually occur as the children listened to each other’s stories and dramatized them together.

I observed this activity over the period of three years (1992-93, 1993-94, and 2000-2001) and collected the stories gathered by the teachers. (All parents had signed consent forms, approved by the College’s Institutional Review Board, to make the stories of their children available to me for analyses and research dissemination.) I conducted extensive classroom observations for the first two years, and with some frequency during the third time.

Story Elicitation Method

Overview. The basic STSA structure involves the following three steps: the teacher invites children to dictate stories to her one at a time; the teacher transcribes each story as it is being dictated; and, later in the day, each child who dictated a story directs the dramatization of the story together with the classroom teacher. The first two steps comprise the storytelling (“ST”) part of the STSA, while the final step comprises the story-acting (“SA”) part.

Storytelling. The storytelling part of the activity took place every day during morning “choice time,” when children were free to participate in different activities available to them. During a portion of this period, the lead teacher was available to write down stories from any child who wanted to tell a story. There were always children who volunteered to tell stories, and the teacher usually took down stories from 2–4 children per day – as many as they had time to dramatize that day. If more children wanted to tell a story, the teacher established a waiting list so the children could go on with other activities. The teacher consulted this list the next day if all the children did not have a chance to tell their story the previous day. All the children in the classroom readily told stories as this was a favorite activity; also, no child was required to tell a story, although the teachers encouraged some of the more reticent ones, especially towards the beginning of the school year (see Nicolopoulou, 2007).

In telling their stories, the child sat mainly next to the teacher at a classroom table. The teacher invited the child to tell any story they wanted (“Do you have a story to tell? Tell me about it”), and she wrote down the child’s story verbatim in a class story notebook. Thus, the teacher did not provide the children with a narrative template or any other guidance in telling these stories (neither content, nor structure, nor grammar). The children were given full freedom to develop their stories in any way they wished. The teachers also provided minimal prompts during the story dictation, and they only inquired, if the child stopped, whether they had something more to add to their story (“Anything else?”) or whether they were finished (“Is there more to your story?”).

Thus, the stories in this corpus were not audiotaped, but the children learned to dictate their stories to the teacher, stopping as the teacher wrote down what they had just said and continued to dictate after she stopped writing. The teacher also occasionally controlled the children if they were going too fast and she could not take the story down. In establishing this rhythm, the teacher read aloud each sentence as she was writing it down for the child to approve it or make any change deemed necessary. When the dictation was complete, the teacher at times read the entire story back to the child, ensuring that she had heard everything correctly. She also reread the story during the dramatization part, as explained below. In any of these times, the teacher readily accepted any changes the child made – and a few children took the opportunity to do so. Single- vs. group-authored stories. Storytelling was mainly an individual activity where a child dictated a story to the teacher. But at times, in these classrooms, two and (rarely) three or more children came to the teacher and asked to tell a story together. These are called group-authored stories. The teacher, however, did not use a consistent or stringent strategy of having each child take turns in telling their story, but allowed the children to tell their story and introject as they wished. So usually, the children took turns telling part of the story, and this turn-taking was repeated a few times specially with the older children. With the younger children, one child started the story and the other finished it. However, the teacher did not indicate which child said what in these group stories.

These group-authored stories are included in each child’s file in the corpus at the exact time point the story was dictated; it is marked as a group-authored story and includes the pseudonyms of the other children who participated in the storytelling and their ages. These group-authored stories are repeated in each child’s file who participated in them. In the table at the beginning of this file, I indicate the number of group-authored stories dictated and I also indicate the number of group-authored stories each child participated in.

Story-acting. The story-acting portion of the activity took place during “group time,” with the entire class assembled. All the stories dictated during that day were acted out in the order dictated. The teacher first read the story aloud to the whole class, and then the author of the story chose children in the classroom (including himself or herself) to act out the characters in the story. As the teacher read the story a second time, the child-actors acted out the story while the rest watched attentively. This process was repeated until all the stories dictated during that day were acted out. However, the story-acting information (who acted in whose stories) was not included in this corpus because of the difficulties in adding this information.

Story transcription. As mentioned, the lead teacher and occasionally the assistant teacher wrote down the stories on a “class storybook,” which I obtained for analysis at the end of the school year. Thus, the first level of transcription was based on the teacher who wrote the story down as the child dictated it, which I followed for the most part, especially for the stories of the younger children. The teachers followed an intuitive sense of putting commas and periods based on children’s spontaneous pauses or downward intonation. However, as the children began to tell stories using complete sentences, the rules of segmentation did not always seem consistent for stories within or between children. For this reason, I decided to segment all the stories into C-units as speech pathologists tend to do with narratives. “A C-unit is an independent clause with its modifiers. It includes one main clause with all subordinate clauses attached to it.” And a clause, whether main or subordinate, is a statement containing both a subject and a predicate (SALT Software, 2016: 1). I used the C-Unit Segmentation Rules by the SALT Software, but at times I deviated slightly. In some cases, children told independent clauses whose verbs seem to be strongly dependent on one another, as it is also indicated on how the teacher transcribed these units (e.g., comes and fights; came and died; went to go and get). The rationale was that these clauses fit together as a unit and require each other to be understood.

Limitations. As mentioned, the teachers were trained to take down the stories and used an intuitive sense of segmenting utterances as the child dictated their story. However, because these stories were not audio-recorded but transcribed intuitively by the teachers and presented in the chat files as C-units, caution should be taken when doing analyses at the utterance level.

Pseudonyms. I used pseudonyms for the children, the classes, and the school. Pseudonyms were also used when specific children or teachers were named in the stories.