Promoting children's narrative skills through a short conversational intervention Earlier studies using imaged wordless stories show that by 4-5 years children can produce descriptive narratives but have difficulties in explaining and evaluating events (e.g., Aksu-Koç & Tekdemir, 2004; Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991; Berman & Slobin, 1994). Can a short conversation focusing on the causes of events improve the linguistic and evaluative aspects of children's narratives? This paper relates results of a study carried out on 104 French-speaking children, aged 5:6 to 8;8 years, attending kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades in a public school of Paris (38 children in each class group). All children were presented with the "Stone Story" composed of five pictures depicting a misunderstanding between two characters. All children were requested to tell what they understood of the story (first narrative). Then, children in the intervention group (84) participated in a conversation with the experimenter who focused the child's attention on the reasons of the story key events. Instead, children in the control group (30) played a memory game with the story pictures and similar cards. Then, all children were asked to narrate once again the story (second narrative). One week later, children told a third narrative of the same story (to test the stability of the eventual gains) as well as a new story analogous to the stone story (to test whether the gains were generalizables). Results show that, relative to their first narrative, children in the conversation group significantly improved the overall coherence and mind-oriented causal plot of their second narrative. They also changed the linguistic expression, that became more "packed" and contained more complex structures and explicit markers of causality and temporality. Instead, children in the control group didn't present any significant changes. Improvements appeared stable and generalizable. The discussion will focus on the significance of the conversational intervention in promoting children's narrative skills and on the nature of the progress obtained. References Aksu-Koç, A., & Tekdemir, G. (2004). Interplay between narrativity and mindreading: A comparison between Turkish and English. Dans S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (dir.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspective (pp. 307-327). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Bamberg, M., & Damrad-Frye, R. (1991). On the ability to provide evaluative comments: Further explorations of children's narrative competencies. Journal of Child Language, 18 (3), 689-710. Berman, R., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.