Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T17:07:12.587Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The range of narrative forms conversationally produced by young children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Alison Preece*
Affiliation:
University of Victoria
*
Department of Communications and Social Foundations, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700, Victoria, British Columbia, CanadaV8W 2Y2.

Abstract

The productive narrative competence of three young children as revealed in their spontaneously occurring conversations recorded over an 18-month period during their kindergarten and grade one years was investigated. Almost 90 hours of the children's conversations, produced as they were being driven to and from school, were audiotaped and analysed in order to determine whether children between the ages of five and seven include narrative accounts in their conversations with each other and, if so, the nature of the narrative language produced. The subjects were found routinely and regularly to produce a striking variety of narrative forms; 14 different narrative types were distinguished and defined, six of which have not previously been reported in the literature on children's narratives. Seventy per cent of the recorded narratives took anecdotal form; original fantasy narratives occurred only rarely. A significant proportion of the narratives were collaboratively created.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by an award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and their assistance is gratefully acknowledged.

References

Abrams, D. M. & Sutton-Smith, B. (1977) The development of the trickster in children's narrative. Journal of American Folklore 90. 2947.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ames, L. B. (1966) Children's stories. Genetic Psychology Monographs 73. 337–96.Google ScholarPubMed
Applebee, A. N. (1978) The child's concept of story: ages two to seventeen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bettleheim, B. (1977) The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Botvin, G. J. & Sutton-Smith, B. (1977) The development of structural complexity in children's fantasy narratives. Developmental Psychology 13. 377–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Britton, J. (1982) Prospect and retrospect. New Jersey: Boynton Cook.Google Scholar
Bruner, J. (1985) Narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought. Yearbook, National Society for the Study of Education.Google Scholar
Chukovsky, K. (1963) From two to five. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garvey, C. (1984) Children's talk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Geller, L. S. G. (1981) Children's humorous language. Unpublished Ed.D. dissertation, New York University.Google Scholar
Heath, S. B. (1982) What no bedtime story means: narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11. 4976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heath, S. B. (1983) Ways with words: language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: C.U.P.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hymes, D. (1980) Narrative thinking and story-telling rights: a folklorist's clue to a critique of education. In Hymes, D., Language in education: ethnolinguistic essays. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Iwamura, S. G. (1980) The verbal games of preschool children. New York: St Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Keenan, E. O. (1983) Conversational competence in children. In Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. B. (eds), Acquiring conversational competence. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Kemper, S. (1984) The development of narrative skills: explanations and entertainments. In Kuczaj, S. A. (ed.), Discourse development: progress in cognitive development research. New York: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Kernan, K. (1977) Semantic and expressive elaboration in children's narratives. In Ervin-Tripp, S. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (eds), Child discourse. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kuczaj, S. A. & McClain, L. (1984) Of hawks and moozes: the fantasy narratives produced by a young child. In Kuczaj, S. A. (ed.), Discourse development: progress in cognitive development. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (1972) Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. & Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In Helm, J. (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Leondar, B. (1977) Hatching plots: genesis of storymaking. In Perkins, D. & Leondar, B. (eds), The arts and cognition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Mandler, J. M. & Johnson, N. J. (1977) Remembrance of things parsed; story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology 9. 111–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maranda, E. & Maranda, K. (1971) Structural models in folklore and transformational essays. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyer, B. (1977) What is remembered from prose: a function of passage structure. In Freedel, R. O. (ed.), Discourse production and comprehension. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. & Seidman, S. (1984) Playing with scripts. In Bretherton, I. (ed.), Symbolic play: the development of social understanding. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Opie, I. & Opie, P. (1959) The lore and language of schoolchildren. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Pitcher, E. G. & Prelinger, E. (1963) Children tell stories: an analysis of fantasy. New York: International Universities Press.Google Scholar
Preece, A. (1985) The development of young children's productive narrative competence in conversational contexts: a longitudinal investigation. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Victoria, British Columbia.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E. (1975) Notes on a schema for stories. In Bobrow, D. G. & Collins, A. M. (eds), Representation and understanding: studies in cognitive science. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sanches, M., & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1976) Children's traditional speech play and child language. In Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (ed.), Speech play. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Shultz, T. R. & Robillard, J. (1980) The development of linguistic humour in children. In McGhee, P. & Chapman, A. (eds), Children's humour. New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Stein, N. L. & Glenn, C. G. (1979) An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In Freedle, R. O. (ed.), New directions in discourse processing. Vol. 2. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Sutton-Smith, B. (1981) The folkstories of children. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teale, W. H. (1984) Reading to young children: its significance for literacy development. In Goelman, H., Oberg, A. & Smith, F. (eds), Awakening to literacy. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Umiker-Sebeok, D. J. (1979) Preschool children's intra-conversational narratives. Journal of Child Language 6. 91109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Volterra, V. (1984) The verbal fantasies of a 2-year-old boy. In Bretherton, I. (ed.), Symbolic play: the development of social understanding. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Watson-Gegeo, K. A. & Boggs, S. T. (1977) From verbal play to talk story. In Ervin-Tripp, S. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (eds), Child discourse. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Wells, G. (1986) The meaning makers. New Hampshire: Heinemann.Google Scholar