The Whole World Could Hear: The Structure of Haitian-American Children's Narratives

Abstract

The ability to tell personal narrative is an important aspect of developing communicative competence, as well as predictive of literacy achievement. Although cultural differences in narrative structure have been amply documented, little or no such information exists for many cultures, including Haitian. Personal narratives were collected from 10 Haitian-American children (7 years, 6 months) and analyzed using three different systems: high point analysis, story grammar, and Africanist analysis, which was specifically developed for this project. Although some narratives could be appreciated using high point and story grammar analyses, the Africanist approach was best suited to describing the narratives of Haitian-American children.