Evaluation in children's discourse: Genre differences in autobiographical and fictional narratives

Evaluation is the cognitive, emotional, and motivational language that expresses a narrator's reactions to story events and illustrates the meaning and "point" of a narrative. Research shows that narrative evaluation is an important means of distinguishing group differences in studies of literacy, academic success, developmental disabilities, and attachment. Narrative genres, which are defined in part by their particular patterns of evaluation, reflect shared cultural schemas that strongly influence narrative structure and content. Although autobiographical narratives are the earliest narrative genre to develop and are argued to be the most "natural" narrative form, previous research on evaluation has primarily examined fictional narratives, particularly "frog stories," which may not fully reveal children's evaluative competence.;This study examined children's evaluation in five narrative genres: two genres of autobiographical narratives (personal and emotion narratives); two genres of fictional, projective narratives (Children's Apperception Test, CAT; and Revised Tasks of Emotional Development, TED); and a fictional frog story (Mayer, 1969). Narratives were collected in audiotaped interviews with 40 middle-class children, ages 4-9. Interviews were transcribed; individual narratives were identified and then analyzed with a comprehensive coding scheme that captured a wide range of evaluation.;Children used more evaluation in their TED narratives and less evaluation in their frog stories than in any other genre. CAT, personal, and emotion narratives contained equivalent amounts of evaluation. Frequencies of evaluation between the two genres of autobiographical narratives were positively correlated, as were frequencies between the two genres of projective narratives. Evaluation in the frog stories was uncorrelated with evaluation in any other genre. Patterns of children's use of individual evaluative devices differed across genres, demonstrating that children's use of evaluation is highly sensitive to genre and to method of elicitation.;This study is the first to compare children's evaluation in multiple narrative genres. The results document important genre differences in evaluation that should be taken into consideration in studies of children's narrative abilities. The results also provide information that will be valuable on both theoretical and practical levels to future studies that use narratives to assess developmental disabilities, academic success, literacy, and attachment.