Skip to content
Show Menu

Promoting narrative competence through adult–child joint pretense: Lessons from the Scandinavian educational practice of playworld

This paper examines the effects of the playworld educational practice on the development of narrative competence in 5- to 7-year-old children. The playworld educational practice is derived from play pedagogy and the theory of narrative learning, both developed and implemented in Scandinavia. The playworld practice consists of joint adult–child pretense based in a work of children’s literature, discussion, free play, and visual art production. When compared to children under a control intervention (conventional school practices without pretend play), children who participated in the playworld practice show significant improvements in narrative length, coherence, and comprehension, although not in linguistic complexity. These findings provide further evidence concerning the role of pretense in the narrative development of young children.

Privacy Overview
PEDAL

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer generated when you visit a website and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These essential cookies do things like: remembering the notifications you've seen so we do not show them to you again or your progress through a form. They always need to be on.

3rd Party Cookies

We use a set of third party tools to provide information of how our users engage with our website so that we can improve the experience of the website for our users. For example, we collect information about which of our pages are most frequently visited, and by which types of users. We also use third-party cookies to help with performance.