The Four Types Of Children's Narrative

Narratives are stories about real or imagined events that are constructed by putting the sentences together provided a situational context, characters, actions, motivations, emotions, and outcomes (Gillam & Pearson, 2004). Narration is important for academic, social, linguistic, and cultural learning. Children use narratives to relate events and express their thoughts and feelings about important topics. Stories are a common type of oral narrative. Stories can be personal, that is, relating events to the speaker or someone known to the speaker. Other stories are fictional, that is, stories formed by imagination. Present research has focused on children’s narrative abilities via production tasks such as telling a story or forming a story from …show more content…
Content knowledge is a generalized representation of typical events that occur in a narrative. It develops from the specific episodic memories formed after perceiving an event, then later generalized to scripts for events, and eventually become schematic representations. Structural knowledge of an event is involved in a narrative, such as starting with an initiating event, leading to a response to the event, an action of the protagonist, a reaction to the action, and an outcome. Linguistic knowledge is the use of different words in a complex way. Knowledge of context is to adapt complex and varied narrative to the context of the story.
It is believed that a child is able to tell a good story, once he achieves the complete narrative knowledge. A good story should show evidence of all four levels of narrative knowledge. In 1979, Stein & Glenn says “a good narrative would feature a plot structured in a chronological fashion that includes setting details, character descriptions, thematic information, and chronology of events, reactive events and conclusions.” These components of a well-structured story are often defined as story grammar …show more content…
The structure imposed on stories is known as a story schema. A story schema consists of a set of expectations about the temporal—causal relations that bind events in a narrative. Macrostructure is a measure of ‘imposition of structure’ and refers to the hierarchical organization of narratives. Macrostructural analysis evaluates the overall structure of narratives referred to as plot structure in terms of the six story grammar components widely considered to be essential to narrative are: setting, initiating event, internal response, attempt, consequence, and reaction. A description of each component is provided in Table