Telephone-mediated communication effects on young children’s oral and written narratives

This study tested the effectiveness of a telephone-mediated language intervention on enhancing young children’s recontextualization processes in narrative expression. A four-week training program was incorporated into a primary school language-arts curriculum to investigate whether telephone experience designed to heighten listener awareness would augment oral and written narrative skill development. Findings supported predictions that telephone experience would affect both oral and written narrative expression. The telephone intervention enhanced oral psycholinguistic and narrative productivity over the face-to-face comparison treatment. Older students wrote significantly more sophisticated stories than younger students and the telephone enriched the written narratives of older children more than did in-person training. These findings advance theory and highlight educational benefits of a focus on recontextualization processes in distanced communication for understanding and advancing the role of audience awareness in emergent literacy development.