Stories, emotions and word formation: two contextualised interventions for Albanian kindergartens

Substantial research has shown the role of emotion comprehension skills on a range of outcomes, including social competence, relationships, prosocial behaviour and even academic outcomes. Similarly, the role of morphology skills in a range of children’s outcomes such as reading ability and vocabulary skills has been well-established. Research has considered children’s development on emotion comprehension and morphology skills and has found interventions effective in promoting these skills, although evidence base is limited to a small set of countries. Research in Albania on these skills is sparse, and no interventions aiming to improve them have been developed or tested in Albania to date, despite the Albanian kindergarten curriculum expressing the aim to develop children’s emotional and language competence. Responding to these gaps in the literature, we developed two contextualised interventions, one targeting emotion comprehension and the other morphological skills for Albanian Kindergarteners. This study included 53 kindergarteners aged 4- to 5-year-olds in two state kindergartens in Tirana, Albania. The children were randomly assigned to one of the two groups, either receiving the emotion comprehension intervention which focused solely on happiness and sadness (the emotion comprehension group) or receiving the morphological awareness intervention which focused solely on derivational morphology (the morphology group). These two groups act as control groups to one another. For both interventions we considered near- and far-transfer. Since our emotion comprehension intervention focused only on happiness and sadness, we investigated the far-transfer to children’s understanding of anger and fear. Because our morphological awareness intervention focused only on derivational morphology, we explored far-transfer to children’s compound morphology skills. Our results indicated that Albanian kindergarteners’ have mastered emotion matching skills, perform well at receptive understanding of emotions, and have a considerable understanding of emotion-eliciting situations. They, however, perform poorly in labelling emotions, providing sometimes behavioural manifestations of emotions instead. Our results also showed that Albanian children find derivational and compound morphology tasks difficult. These sets of skills are comparable to those of children from other countries. Considering the effectiveness of the emotion comprehension intervention, we found the emotion comprehension group improved more in their overall emotion comprehension performance between pre-test and post-test than the morphology group. This was also the case for most of the emotion comprehension sub-components tested. Considering the effectiveness of the morphology intervention, we found that the morphology group improved more in their overall derivational and compound morphology performance between pre-test and post-test than the emotion comprehension group. This was also the case for all the morphology skills tested. We also found evidence of far-transfer for both interventions, which has not been explored by prior research. These findings are discussed and interpreted in this paper in relation to previous research from other countries and their implications, and suggestions for future research are made.

Keywords: emotion comprehension
intervention
morphological awareness
Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT)
kindergarten
FFR
near and far transfer
contextualised
Advisor: Nag, S