Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Developing Narratives in Native American Children

Abstract

Because narratives involve decontextualized language, they can facilitate students’ transition from oral to literate language. Narratives, however, vary across cultures in structure, content, and function. These narrative variations may influence academic performance of children from non-mainstream backgrounds. Understanding of children’s development of mainstream narratives can be useful in planning educational strategies to facilitate students’ literacy success. This investigation documented English narrative development in third through fifth-grade children identified as regular ( n=18) and special education ( n=18) students who were from a traditional Southwest Native American community in which Keres was the home language. Children told stories in response to a wordless picture-book and book covers and wrote a story in response to a wordless cartoon video. Narratives were evaluated in terms of syntactic complexity, story grammar complexity, and use of landscape of consciousness elements. Results revealed that the both regular and special education students exhibited narratives with increasing syntactic and story grammar complexity and the use of landscape of consciousness elements. However, story grammar levels were lower than reported data on story grammar structures of narratives that were produced by mainstream children. Many stories reflected characteristics of Native American syntactic structures and story structure and content.