Rural students’ performance in written narratives and possible relations with profile variables

Abstract

The goal of this research was to characterize written stories, produced by students, without complaint of language development (oral and written), from pictographic support. In a specific way, it has been searched, in those stories, elements that could grant coherence, applying that performance with the participants’ profile variables. It was characterized as a descriptive-exploratory study, held at a rural municipal school in the State of Parana. Twenty-one (21) students of both genders and ages between seven and nine years old have participated in this study. Data collection consisted of two narratives requests: one oral, after being released, to the child, four pictures placed in sequence to form a story, and one written. This writing production had been taken for the analysis. The results have indicated that most children (71.42%) managed to produce coherent stories, seventeen (80%) in story 1 and thirteen (61%) in story 2. As to the relation of that coherence with the students’ profile in story 1, there has been no statistically significant association, for none of the analyzed variables (gender, age and education), whereas there has been a statistically significant association with gender in story 2 (p-value 0.027). It is considered that the use of the pictographic support in developing stories have been confirmed as a facilitating strategy for its construction, for it has enabled the production of coherent narratives.