- 58 - linkage between oral and written influences on children’s knowledge of story forms is a
complex one. This relationship needs to be analyzed if we are to consider some implications of children’s developing knowledge of the adult world of written language for
their progress in many school-based language tasks, such as reading and writing. Cook- Gumperz and Green 1984:202
Young second-language learners are not introduced to this oral and literate English culture until they reach school age, and so they obviously have a lot of catching up to do. But do
they acquire this sense of story more quickly than their monolingual peers and absorb it as part of their total adaptation to the whole environment of school? It would seem that they
do. Storytelling, both oral and written, is a foundational activity in the average Infant School. Children are encouraged to produce both factual and fictional stories in oral and
written modes. Second-language learners learn fast in order to cope in this new world into which they have so suddenly been plunged.
3.2 Experimental Studies of Narrative Ability in Children
Studies of narrative ability in adults have focused largely on the underlying structural forms upon which the particular narrative discourse under discussion has been constructed.
Researchers have been interested in such questions as the relationship between the sequence of past events which occurred in real time and the way such events have been
presented by the narrator and organized in the discourse Genette 1980; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Bal 1985. They have also concerned themselves with the way in which this
underlying structure is “realized linguistically by choices among syntactic options”, i.e. the surface forms which are generated by these abstract underlying structures Halliday 1971;
Burton 1982; Kennedy 1982. Some linguists arrange these structural elements as a hierarchy, “where there is a necessary entailment between elements of the story at each
level” Rumelhart 1975 and 1977. Others order these same elements in a linear way “so that one element grows out of another” Propp 1968. Both of these models of story
structure grow out of a “literate adult model of written stories”. Then there is the sociolinguistic perspective, where research has centred on the particular performance style
selected by the narrator, i.e. the verbal delivery of the story Hymes 1972; Goffman 1974; Wolfson 1982. Here, “the speech event of storytelling is seen as an event culturally varying
from the everyday flow of conversation”. Emphasis is on the context in which the story was narrated and the cultural presuppositions and values which are reflected in it Polanyi 1979
and 1982a; Tannen 1984b; Schiffrin 1987.
- 59 - Work on children’s narratives has typically been focused on the evaluation of “the extent
to which children are able to recognize or to reproduce a story that corresponds in structure and realization to an adult-centred model of the narrative form”. We have already
mentioned the Story Grammar approach and the work of Rumelhart 1975 and 1977, Thorndyke 1977, and Mandler and Johnson 1977 in chapter 2. An attempt to analyse
our own data using this model proved to be singularly unrewarding; such a conclusion is also supported by Cook-Gumperz and Green 1984 who state that “such an adult-
centered focus may not be the best basis from which to discover the origin and scope of children’s storytelling abilities” p. 202. They launch off with two general hypotheses:
First, no one model is assumed to exist for all narratives on an a priori basis. Rather, the narrative performances of children must be explored for patterns indicative of the child’s
own model of narratives. Second, children are not assumed to move linearly from an oral model directly to the adult literate written model. Rather, the process is more complex
with a variety of paths to reach the goal of a literate model. The process of acquisition of narrative ability is not similarly assured for all children. 1984:202–203
Maclure, Mason, and Barratz 1979 concerned themselves with the ability of children to remember and reproduce a story sequence correctly, while Applebee 1978 focused on
children’s recognition of story structures by requiring his subjects to evaluate good and poor story forms. In both types of studies, children were presented with “well-formed
stories” and, also, those which “violated” this structure. A “well-formed story” is defined as one that has the structure and syntactic realization that contain a beginning, an initiating
sequence, a series of consequential actions, and a conclusion. The researchers violated these ideal story structures in specific ways in order to explore the effect of this disruption
on recall and comprehension. However, work of this nature does nothing to explain how children acquire a “sense of story” or the ability to produce stories. The reproduction
exercise merely compares the child’s performance with the adult model, whereas the evaluation exercise calls upon the child’s own powers of judgment. It would seem from
Applebee’s work that children need to find certain structural components, like “proper” introductions and conclusions, within a presented story before they are able to recognize it
as the genuine article. They have cognitive models for what a story structure should include and these models approximate to the adult literate model; but in experimental work of this
kind, children do not have to make any active storytelling contributions themselves. It is
- 60 - their comprehension which is being tested, not their “ability to produce or contribute to
narratives spontaneously” Cook-Gumperz and Green 1984:204.
3.3 The Story as a Speech Event
