Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T22:49:17.680Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Narrative skills and genre knowledge: Ways of telling in the primary school grades

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Deborah Hicks
Deborah Hicks*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
*
Department of Educational Development, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Children in the preschool years develop a linguistic repertoire of narrative skills as they adapt their ways of representing events to different occasions of language use. The present study examines the abilities of primary school children to draw upon their repertoire of narrative skills in the service of language tasks. Children in grades K-2 were shown a shortened version of the silent film, The Red Balloon, and were asked to perform three narrative tasks: (a) produce an on-line narration of a 3-minute segment from the film, (b) recount the film's events as a news report, and (c) recount the film's events as an embellished story. The narrative texts produced for each task were subjected to analyses of linguistic markers of genre differences. The findings revealed very subtle distinctions between the narrative texts produced for the three genre tasks, leading to the conclusion that primary grade children have only nascent ability to apply their genre knowledge to school language tasks.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 83 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Applebee, A. (1978). The child's concept of story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bamberg, M. (1986). A functional approach to the acquisition of anaphoric relationships. Linguistics, 24, 227–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, R. (1966). Introduction a l'aralyse structurale des recits. Communications, 8, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. (1988). On the ability to relate events in narrative. Discourse Processes, 11, 469–497.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R., Slobin, D., Bamberg, M., Dromi, E., Marchman, V., Neeman, Y., Renner, T., & Sebastian, E. (1986). Coding manual: Temporality in discourse (Rev. ed.). Cognitive Science Program, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Bidell, T. (1984). Reflexive abstraction in reading comprehension: Toward a qualitative model. Paper presented at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. (Ed.). (1980). The Pear stories: Cultural, cognitive, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Chatman, S. (1969). New ways of analyzing narrative structure with an example from Joyce's Dubliners. Language and Style, 2, 3–36.Google Scholar
Clancy, P. et al. , (1976). The acquisition of conjunction. A cross-linguistic study. Papers and reports on child language development. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. (1971). On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 10, 266–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dijk, T. van (1980). Story comprehension: An introduction. Poetics, 9, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, A. (1985). Learning to describe past experiences in conversation. Discourse Processes, 8, 177–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fivush, R., Gray, J., & Fromhoff, F. (1987). Two-year-olds talk about the past. Cognitive Development, 2(4), 393–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gee, J. P. (1987). What is literacy? Paper presented at the Mailman Foundation Conference on Families and Literacy, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Gerhardt, J. (1988). From discourse to semantics: The development of verb morphology and forms of self-reference in the speech of a two-year-old. Journal of Child Language, 15, 337–393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and at school. Language in Society, 11, 49–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heath, S. B. (1986). Taking a cross-cultural look at narratives. Topics in Language Disorders, 7(1), 84–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickmann, M. (1980). Creating referents in discourse: A developmental analysis of linguistic cohesion. In Kreiman, J. & Ojeda, E. (Eds.). Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora (pp. 192–203). Chicago Linguistic Society Meetings.Google Scholar
Hicks, D. (1987). Temporal flexibility in narrative: A linguistic analysis of the use of complex ordering constructions by primary school children. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Hicks, D. (1988a). The development of genre skills: A linguistic analysis of primary school children's stories, reports and eventcasts. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Hicks, D. (in press). Genre skills and narrative development in the elementary school years. Linguistics and Education.Google Scholar
Hicks, D., & Wolf, D. (1988). Texts within texts: A developmental study of children's play narratives. Papers and reports on child language development. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hopper, P., & Thompson, S. (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language, 56(2), 251–299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, V. (1986). The use of connectives in low-income elementary children's writing and its relation to their reading, writing, and language skill development. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1980). Psychological processes underlying pronominalization and non-pronominalization in children's connected discourse. Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora, Chicago Linguistic Society Meetings.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1987). Transcript Analysis. Manual for use of the CHAT transcription coding system of the child language data exchange system, 4(1).Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B., & Snow, C. (1985). The child language data exchange system. Journal of Child Language, 12(2), 271–296.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mandler, J. (1987). On the psychological reality of story structure. Discourse Processes, 10(1), 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandler, J., & DeForest, M. (1979). Is there more than one way to recall a story? Child Development, 50, 886–889.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandler, J., & Johnson, N. (1977). Remembrance of things passed: Story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 111–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaels, S., & Collins, J. (1984). Oral discourse styles: Classroom interaction and the acquisition of literacy. In Tannen, D. (Ed.), Coherence in spoken and written discourse. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Miller, P., & Sperry, L. (1988). Early talk about the past: The origins of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Language, 15, 293–315.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, K. (1978). How children represent knowledge of their world in and out of language: A preliminary report. In Siegler, R. S. (Ed.), Children's thinking: What develops? Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (1986). Event knowledge: Structure and function in development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Nelson, K., & Gruendel, J. (1981). Generalized event representations: Basic building blocks of cognitive development. In Lamb, M. & Brown, A. (Eds.), Advances in developmental psychology (Vol. 1). Hillside, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ninio, A. (1988). The roots of narrative: Discussing recent events with very young children. Language Sciences, 10(1), 35–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pappas, C., & Brown, E. (1988). The development of children's sense of the written story register: An analysis of the texture of kindergartners' “pretend reading” texts. Linguistics and Education, 1(1), 45–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1983). Developmental psycholinguistics: Three ways of looking at a child's narrative. New York: Plenum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Preece, A. (1987). The range of narrative forms conversationally produced by young children. Journal of Child Language, 14, 353–373.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Quirk, R., & Greenbaum, S. (1973). A concise grammar of contemporary English. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Rubin, S., & Wolf, D. (1979). The development of maybe: The evolution of social roles into narrative roles. In Winner, E. & Gardner, H. (Eds.), Fact, fiction, and fantasy in childhood (New Directions for Child Development, 6).Google Scholar
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (1981). Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Basso, K. & Selby, H. (Eds.), Meaning in anthropology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Silva, M. (1984). Developmental issues in the acquisition of conjunction. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 23, 106–114. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Snow, C. (1983). Literacy and language: Relationships during the preschool years. Harvard Educational Review, 53(2), 165–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, N. (1982). What's in a story: Interpreting the interpretation of story grammars. Discourse Processes, 5, 319–335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, N., & Glenn, C. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In Freedle, R. (Ed.), New directions in discourse comprehension (Vol. 2). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Stoel-Gammon, C., & Scliar Cabral, L. (1977). Learning how to tell it like it is: The development of the reportative function in children's speech. Papers and Reports in Child Language Development, 13 (ED 144 383).Google Scholar
Sutton-Smith, B. (1981). Introduction to The folkstories of children. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton-Smith, B., Botvin, G. & Mahoney, D. (1976). Developmental structures in fantasy narratives. Human Development, 19, 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Umiker-Sebeok, J. (1978). Preschool children's introconversational narratives. Journal of Child Language, 6, 91–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson-Gegeo, K., & Boggs, S. (1977). From verbal play to talk story: The role of routines in speech events among Hawaiian children. In Ervin-Tripp, S. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (Eds.), Child Discourse. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Wells, G. (1986). The meaning makers: Children learning language and using language to learn. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books.Google Scholar
Wolf, D., & Hicks, D. (1989). The voices within narratives: The development of intertextuality in young children's stories. Discourse Processes, 12(3), 329–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar