In my thesis I studied the promotion of children's speech and language skills in pre-school. I focused on the study of storytelling with a wordless picture book. In the theoretical part, I defined the concepts of speech and language and presented the factors that influence the development of speech. I focused on storytelling, the development of storytelling, the factors that co-determine the level of storytelling and defined criteria for assessing the coherence of a story. I introduced the different types of picture books, the role and importance of illustration, and described in more detail a wordless picture book, The Boy and the House. The empirical part presents the results of the research I conducted with a wordless picture book The Boy and the House by Maja Kastelic. Twenty children were randomly selected to take part in the study, ten children aged 3-4 and ten children aged 5-6, who told stories alongside a picture book with no text, which I then wrote down and determined their level of coherence. In the study, I looked at the proportion of children who needed prompting in the form of questions from the teacher when telling a story, and who the children thought was the main character in the story. The results of the analysis showed that the age of the child and his/her linguistic ability are the main factors influencing the degree of coherence. The younger children's stories were full of enumeration, and most of them needed prompting from the teacher in the form of questions. Older children told more coherent stories, but none of the participating children told a story at the highest level of coherence. One of the children needed prompting in the form of questions from the teacher, while the other children told the story independently. An analysis of the children's answers on who they thought was the main character of the story showed that the children answered differently and that their answers were not influenced by their age.
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