This thesis deals with the issue of storytelling by children enrolled in public preschools and in private preschools that operate according to the pedagogical principles of Montessori pedagogy. Storytelling has a positive impact on children's development and learning in different areas, and can also be used as an approach for assessing the level of a child's language development. For the latter purpose, it was used in this thesis as well, namely by analysing the coherence, cohesiveness and syntactic level in stories told by children under different storytelling conditions (with a picture book with text, with a picture book without text, and with an adult in preschool reading the beginning of the story). The results showed that under different conditions, children tell differently coherent and cohesive stories depending on the type of program in which they are enrolled, and there are differences in the syntactic level of stories between children involved in different preschool programs as well. In addition, the work was interested in the opinions on storytelling by preschool children provided by preschool teachers employed in public preschools and in private preschools that operate according to the pedagogical principles of Montessori pedagogy. All interviewees believe that storytelling is important for children's development and learning in different areas, so they try to encourage it in various ways. Furthermore, they include children in the selection of high-quality children's literature that they discuss in the educational process.
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