African American kindergartners' spoken narratives: Topic associating and topic centered styles

Abstract

This article discusses narrative styles of 48 African American low-income urban kindergartners. The starting point for this study was the work of Michaels (1981,1986, 1991) who found that during a classroom activity known as "sharing time," African American first-graders tended to produce narratives that did not cohere around single topics but around a series of loosely and often unclearly related episodes, a style Michaels called topic associating. This was in contrast to the Caucasian first-graders who tended to use a topic centered style. The results of the study presented here, however, reveal that of the 48 kindergarten children, 16 told topic associating stories and 28 told topic centered stories. Although storybook and fairy tale themes and structures were present across the two narrative styles, they were found most clearly in 9 of the topic centered narratives. Results show that although the patterns that Michaels reported were indeed found with these younger, urban, African American children in an uninterrupted storytelling context, these patterns were not the dominant ones. Examples of the styles are discussed, paying particular attention to the thematic and structural characteristics in the topic associating style. Issues concerning contexts for speech and literacy in the classrooms of these and other U.S. students are discussed.