Abstract
The investigation of narrative skills in children is significant in many respects; amongst other things, narratives can yield information about a child’s use of decontextualised, literate language features (Curenton and Justice 2004) while simultaneously providing access to the child’s level of competence concerning narrative-specific aspects. Narrative abilities have been linked to literacy development and academic achievement (Dickinson and Tabors 2001) and are often used to predict language progress (Botting, Faragher, Simkin, Knox and Conti-Ramsden 2001). Moreover, narrative skills constitute an area of verbal language development in which delays are difficult to compensate (Girolametto, Wiigs, Smyth, Weitzman and Pearce 2001, Manhardt and Rescorla 2002). However, in multilingual settings the assessment of narrative skills cannot be restricted to language proficiency measurements in each of a child’s languages. Rather, this assessment needs to include “linguistic descriptions of ethno-linguistic discourse patterns (contrastive rhetoric)” (Barnitz 1986:95) in order to assess the roles which cultural knowledge and language-specific narrative text structure elements play in the development of narrative skills in multilingual children. This article discusses the necessity to identify such language-specific elements of story structures. Empirical findings are presented which illustrate that 10- to 12-year-old children from Malawi exhibit narrative practices while they retell visually and aurally presented stories. It appears that these narrative practices are influenced by African folktales. The children’s retellings in both Chichewa and English cannot simply be measured by canonical narrative text structures commonly used in academic settings. The global significance of such a discussion is reflected by a growing concern that academic success may be compromised by a misalignment between the narrative practices in a child’s primary language(s) and the narrative practices in a respective language of teaching and learning (e.g. Makoe and McKinney 2009, Souto-Manning 2013).
Highlights
Neither the concept of ‘story grammar’ nor the related concept of ‘story schema’ are homogeneous
The understanding prevails that “good”, comprehensible narratives adhere to an underlying narrative text structure: listeners evaluate the quality of narratives against the background of an intuitively “good” story structure1 and educators use the concept of a ‘canonical narrative text structure’ to both teach narrative structure to children as well as to assess children’s narrative skills in educational contexts
Our findings indicate that children who are exposed to traditional African storytelling during socialisation might be influenced in their storytelling practices by a narrative text structure that is different from the “canonical” narrative text structure widely employed in educational settings
Summary
Neither the concept of ‘story grammar’ nor the related concept of ‘story schema’ are homogeneous. The understanding prevails that “good”, comprehensible narratives adhere to an underlying narrative text structure: listeners evaluate the quality of narratives against the background of an intuitively “good” story structure (which should not be too predictable but which should not be a random series of events) and educators use the concept of a ‘canonical narrative text structure’ to both teach narrative structure to children as well as to assess children’s narrative skills in educational contexts. The concept of a ‘canonical’ narrative text structure is widely used for comparisons of educational systems, for example, by measuring narrative comprehension in school children from different areas, countries and continents. We argue that language proficiency measurements need to take into account a child’s “narrative socialisation”; in other words, teaching and assessment of narrative text structure needs to be based on “[...] linguistic descriptions of ethnolinguistic discourse patterns (contrastive rhetoric)” (Barnitz 1986:95)
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