Children's narrative, story grammar, and the school-age student
Children's narrative: Narrative is a spoken or written message that follows the rules of story grammar,
which recounts a chain of events in a story.
Stories have a dependable structure that
is highly reliable and consistent.
That structure is known as story grammar.
The story grammar rule generally centres on a main character who overcomes a problem,
or series of problems and learns a valuable lesson from the events of the story.
Children, with typical language development, enter school with narrative skills
that are developed and honed at home and in their community.
Children at the age of 4-5 years are usually adept at narrating personal recounts.
That is, telling a listener about their own experiences.
When children create stories - the invention of stories, not centred on their life experiences - this requires a more sophisticated grasp of language.
Young school-age students are expected to be familiar with this particular genre as they begin their school life. Their oral stories have a good awareness of time and place and character motivation is clear.
In contrast with normally developing children, children with language difficulty typically create stories that have a poor sense of time and place, and undeveloped character motivation.
The stories lack detail and are generally very short. Grammatical structure tends to
be chaotic and the child's lack of semantic knowledge leads to
stories with limited information.
Story Grammar
What follows is the structure of a typical story grammar using an example from
an original story:
'Guff the Neanderthal Boy.'
Guff is a young Neanderthal boy on his first hunt,in prehistoric times in Europe,
150 000 years ago. Guff's tribe is hunting wooly mammoths for food.
The hunt goes terribly wrong and in the resulting panic Guff becomes separated from
his tribe. He is alone and lost.
That night Guff sleeps in a ditch to hide from predators. The next morning he follows
a river that he hopes will lead to his tribe's camping ground.
After a long morning of travel Guff becomes hungry and later spears a fish in the river.
Guff makes a campfire, then cooks and eats the fish. The smell of the cooked fish attracts
two sabre-tooth tigers, eager to make a meal of Guff.
Guff is too quick for the tigers and rapidly climbs a nearby tree. The tigers try in vain
but are unable to climb the tree.
The sabre-tooth tigers are frightened off by members of Guff's tribe
who have seen the smoke from Guff's campfire and have come to investigate.
Guff is safe.
Story Grammar Structure
Title: Guff the Neanderthal Boy
Setting (Where and when): 150 000 years ago in prehistoric Europe.
Initiating event: Ged is on his first hunt, hunting wooly mammoths.
Problem: The hunt goes terribly wrong and Guff becomes separated from his tribe.
Plan or attempts: Guff follows a river that may lead him home. He catches a fish
and cooks it.
Consequence: The smell of the cooked fish attracts two sabre-tooth tigers. Guff
climbs a tree to escape.
Resolution: Members of Guff's tribe arrive to save him from the tigers. Guff is safe.
Moral: Guff's resourcefulness and courage save him in a dangerous environment.
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