Analysis Of Hickmann's A Cat Story

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This experiment involved recording the two children individually telling a story based on Hickmann’s ‘A Cat Story’. These children are expected to create a story based on their own imagination. The two participants are recorded separately on the 25th January 2017 (Participant B) and 8th February 2017 (Participant A). Either participant was not in the same room during the actual recording. Before the actual recording started, the participants were introduced and familiarised to the characters in the pictures and made sure that the participants knew the purpose and what was going on. The pictures were arranged in horizontal-numerical manner and done in a reserved room. A verbal instruction was done before the storytelling started and to ensure …show more content…

Story Grammar Category allows the examiner to understand and predict the structure and the function of story parts of the overall story of the participants. With reference from Appendix C, the story grammar categories based on the participants’ utterances were as such: The 7 levels of story grammar complexity helps the examiner to understand if the participants are capable of creating complex sentences. The complexity level is arranged from 1 to 7; where 1 is the simplest and 7 as the most complex structure level. The Narrative Stage is a basic six structure to observe the participants’ skills in linking objects and constructing events in a story. Seemingly, we have reached the same conclusion as to Downey and Hickmann where they mention that children grasped referring expressions skills, particularly pronominal and nominal system at an early age. The children did use both nominal and pronominal during the storytelling session. However, the children participants used nominal determiner more frequently than pronominal …show more content…

A reason for this could be that the children’s use of determiner skills is not fully developed yet as both are still in lower grades with limited vocabulary knowledge. In addition, their pronouns skills are more constrained than their determinant skills. For instance, their frequency of possessive pronoun ‘-nya’ are different; with Participant A, zero usage; Participant B, twice; and control participant 11