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In this issue of the journal, we present the international experience in the study of narratives in preschool children. The authors of the articles live and work in different European countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Finland, Sweden and Russia). All publications are grouped around the same topic of the story of children in a monolingual or bilingual situation.

Relevance. Research on the narratives of bilingual children is extremely important, as it shows the child’s full linguistic competence, which in turn will allow teachers and educators to choose the appropriate program.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the narratives of Russian-Swedish billing children. The author examines both mistakes (or “innovations”) and strategies that are used by children with a lack of lexical and / or grammatical means. An attempt will also be made to explain the cause of the observed phenomena.

Description of the research progress. The study involved 25 Russian-Swedish bilingual’s children aged from 4.5 years to 9.2 years. The material for this study was collected using a specially developed tool for collecting narratives Litmus MAIN (The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). In addition to storytelling from pictures, spontaneous speech data and ethnolinguistic observations were collected.

Results. The study showed that many children were unfamiliar with the Russian equivalent of Swedish words and often used gestures when they did not know the word. Swedish was often used for metalinguistic comments and questions. Children were prone to lexical innovation and changing the meaning of words. They often mixed synonyms or lexical units close in meaning or sound. Children with weak Russian language had cases of transfer, as well as the following grammatical errors: incorrect case endings, mistakes in choosing the verb gender, the use of an incorrect preposition and case form, errors in using an accusative instead of a locative and errors in the form of a verb.

Conclusion. Considering the features of children’s narratives, the author shows how the lack of input and dominant language affects their stories. Since language acquisition in Sweden takes place in a specific context, the input is often limited to situations that the child encounters in daily life. In this regard, parents and teachers of their native language need to find more opportunities to practice the Russian language. It is necessary to create language situations in which children will want to talk about what happened to them. It is important for parents and teachers to try to motivate the child to tell it in Russian, to find time to play together, listen to the child, engage in joint activities and help find lexical means to express their thoughts.

Goal-setting. The paper focuses on narrative abilities of preschool children as a resource for their cognitive development. Considering the speech and language development by children applies Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach. The development is viewed as a dialectical process: development is considered not as a gradual growth, but as a series of qualitative transformations. The study emphasizes two statements from Lev Vygotsky’s analysis: first, the idea of the genetic connection of telling (and drawing) stories with the future learning of reading and writing; second, the idea of connection between figurative and verbal means of creating narratives at the preschool age. Lev Vygotsky’s ideas were considered in relation with current studies on children’s narrative abilities.

Procedure and Methods. The paper describes the study on connection between the structure of children’s narratives and the dialectical thinking of preschoolers.

Applied methods: “What can be at the same time?” (N.Veraksa); “What can be the other way round?)” (A. Belolutskaya); “Children’s test of cyclic representations” (N. Veraksa, S. Senyukova), “Tell a story” (A. Mak Keib). The study involved 34 children aged from five years to six years and eleven months. Each child was studied individually to avoid the influence of other children on the content of the story. A study on the method “Compilation of history using a dialectical pattern” (I. B. Shiyan) involving 44 senior preschool children (5 – 6.5 years of age) has been conducted. Children were asked to invent their own story (based on imagination or describing real events that happened to the child) using a dialectical pattern (beginning, middle, end) or without using one.

Results and Conclusion. The connection with the success of dialectical approach was detected only for stories based on the pattern. The study came to conclusion that using the “beginning, end, middle” storytelling pattern encourages children to create a more complex narrative, including operating with opposites. The creation of narratives can be used as a resource of cognitive development, in particular development of dialectical thinking in senior preschool children.

Background. The development of creative thinking is one of the important tasks of early childhood education. It is important to understand the role children’s activities, particularly story-telling, can play in this development. Of particular interest are narrative practices that create a social situation that supports children’s writing.

Objective: to analyze the influence of the narrative practice of “fairy tales with provocations” on the development of creative (dialectical) thinking of older preschoolers and individual parameters of fairy tale stories that children create.

Methods. The study involved 60 children aged 6-7 years. To diagnose creative (dialectical) thinking, the “What can happen at the same time?” (Veraksa N.E.) technique was used; to diagnose creative thinking and the ability to create symbolic images, the “Fire” subtest was used (the “Three Stories” method by Shiyan O.A.). We proposed the narrative practice “Fairy Tales with Provocations” as a way to activate children’s creative thinking.

Results. According to the results of the initial diagnostics, no significant differences were found; the results of the children in the experimental and control groups did not have any of the study parameters. The final diagnostics showed that in the control group no significant positive changes were found compared to the initial diagnosis in any of the studied parameters, while in the experimental group significant positive changes were found at a significant level in everyone according to all measurable parameters: creative (dialectical) thinking, creative transformations and artistic (symbolic) image in narratives, as well as the structure of narratives.

Conclusion. The study showed that the narrative practice “Fairy Tales with Provocations” is an adequate way to develop creative (dialectical) thinking, and also has a positive effect on the stories that children create: they become more complex and structured, they contain more creative transformations and artistic (symbolic) images. All this suggests that such symbolic activities as writing fairy tales are an important space for the development of children’s creativity. The results can be used to build educational work with children based on the resource of children’s activities.