- 51 - Numbers 1–6 are found in the data; all the subjects had problems with English vocabulary
and all the narratives recorded contain some hesitations and incomplete utterances. The question is, how far do these detract from the flow of the story and its effectiveness as a
communicative act? In some cases the answer is, very little; in others, intelligibility is seriously impaired. Most narratives begin with an orientation section and only a few “begin
in the middle of things”. Disordered temporal sequencing, ambiguous pronominal reference, and meaningless repetition occur mainly in the narratives of children whose
ability was judged by their teachers to be either “fair” or “poor”, i.e. the less able. Evaluation and plot construction narrative structure are seen as two sides of the same
coin—effective communication within narrative. In order to adequately characterize the data under discussion, we need to appeal to both notions and so, for the rest of this
chapter, we will discuss various aspects of sequencing and plot construction. In our concluding remarks we will put the two sides together again and briefly summarize the
main points made in the chapter.
2.5 Aspects of Sequencing and Plot Construction
In section 2.4.1 p. 30 we quoted Labov as stating that “the skeleton of narrative…consists of a series of temporally ordered clauses which we may call narrative
clauses” and in the previous section 2.4.6 we referred to part of Aqeel’s Story A as “a skeleton without any meat on the bones” because, although it is unevaluated, it does
describe a temporally ordered series of events. However, using the same metaphor, we would describe Shazia’s Story C p. 49 as just a miscellaneous heap of unconnected bones
because it is incoherent and there is no temporal backbone running through it. Between clauses 4 and 5 there does seem to be a temporal link but then 6 is a repetition of 4, and 7
is a reiteration of 5. Shazia has obvious performance difficulties on account of her low level of proficiency in English. But what has the literature to say in general terms about the
ability of young children to handle temporal relations and other plot-related topics? Clark and Clark 1977 make the following general observations:
When children talk about events, they stick closely to the “here and now”. They focus on what is happening, what has just happened, or what is just about to happen. When they start to talk about events in sequence,
therefore, they stick very closely to their actual order of occurrence—they describe the first event first, the
- 52 - second event second, and so on. This parallel between order of occurrence and order of mention appears both
in production and comprehension. Clark and Clark 1977:506 When they interpret what others say to them, children also assume that the first event
mentioned was the first to occur; so when the conjunctions “before” and “after” were introduced to three-year-olds, E. Clark 1971 found that they failed to understand them if
“the order of mention did not match the order of occurrence”. They relied on their order- of-mention strategy and “ignored the contrastive meaning in the conjunctions” cf.
Ferreiro 1971; Amidon and Carey 1972; H. L. Johnson 1975. Clark found that some children “got before right while continuing to make mistakes on after”; only later did they
finally figure out the correct meaning of “after”. In Labov’s terms, clauses containing “before” or “after” are not narrative clauses because the semantic interpretation is not
disturbed if you say: a. “You must wash the dishes before you go out” or
b. “Before you go out, you must wash the dishes” Similarly, if you say:
c. “You must put the dishes away after you have washed them” or d. “After you have washed the dishes, you must put them away”
These are more difficult to process than independent narrative clauses, and according to Clark’s findings, b and c would pose greater problems than a or d. There are no examples
of “before” and “after” in our data. We have either markedunmarked temporal sequence, indicated by “and” or “then”, or logical stimulus-response relationships, indicated by “so”,
e.g., Shvinder’s Story A: 29
he dropped his bowl and his spoon 30
and he said, “.....” 71
He posted it to Father Christmas. 72
And then, in the night when the fire was out 73
a rice came down the chimney. 12
“There’s none rice left.” 13
“So what can we do?”
- 53 - The work of Nelson and her colleagues demonstrates that children’s spontaneous sequencing
of events shows a mature organization of sequential order if they are presented with familiar material Nelson 1978; Nelson and Gruendel 1979, 1981; French and Nelson 1981. Other
studies, such as Wimmer 1982 and Stein and Trabasso 1982, reinterpret earlier work and prove that apparent sequencing errors are attributable to performance difficulties or
confusions introduced by interlocutors. These studies seem to point to the early development of narrative competence when the order of telling matches the order of occurrence. The
researchers used a schema approach as in Story Grammars: see pp. 25–27 and, employing an experimental research design, were looking primarily at cognitive development, and tasks
involving comprehension and recall skills. Wimmer suggests that meta-cognitive abilities are central to the effective handling of narrative structures Wimmer 1982:127ff.. Such abilities
may be particularly relevant to the “before”—”after” problem mentioned above and, at a later stage, to the presentation of “flashbacks” or “flashforwards” in order to surprise an audience
or create an atmosphere of suspense cf. Chatman 1978:59ff.. Such skills show up very late in development—and not necessarily equally well in all narrators.
Interestingly, Kemper 1984 compares the schema approach and high-point analysis directly, assessing their ability to capture the developmental changes which occur between
the ages of two and ten. The conclusions are that the two models have many similarities: both approaches view the development of story structure as essentially complete by the age
of ten, “although 10-year-olds may be limited in terms of the number of embedded or interactive episodes that they can handle at one time” p. 113; neither model works well
for the narratives of the under fives, but they both capture successfully the changes which occur between the ages of 5 and 10. Peterson and McCabe 1983 also conclude that, in the
final analysis, both approaches are very similar in the way they deal with fictional stories and, for this reason, the developmental findings of the two do not vary much p. 108. This
is surprising, in view of our own comments recorded on pages 26–27. However, we are not engaged in a developmental study as such, and the opinions expressed there were merely
related to the finding of a suitable analytical method which would characterize performance data. Conceptually, we would expect some degree of harmony between the two: the
schema approach is useful in the assessment of the child’s developing cognitive abilities and high-point analysis is best suited to the study of communicative development.
Researchers using it have particularly noted the young child’s lack of ability to focus on the narrative task without getting sidetracked by interference from their interlocutors. Mandler
1983, in commenting on the results of comprehensionrecall and production studies,
- 54 - suggests “that a story schema may be used in encoding and retrieving stories earlier than it
can be used to create a new story.” Bamberg 1987 talks about the notions of cohesion and coherence and how they relate to
the two kinds of abilities under discussion. Cohesion is not confined to a purely linguistic level of connecting interclausal and
intersentential relationships, nor is it defined at a purely conceptual level of “integrating events into units”. Rather it addresses the relationship between the linguistic portrayal in
terms of the formal devices at the textual level and the intended story at the conceptual level of uniting events into units, and those units in turn into the whole. Bamberg
1987:14 The notions of coherence and cohesion are not mutually exclusive, but rather mark two
ends of a continuum that can be investigated from both sides. On the one hand, it is assumed that particular forms are used to signal how single propositions relate to each
other—both with regard to how the speaker wants the events represented to be understood as temporally or causally connected, as well as with regard to where the speaker places
himherself in relationship to the plot, its reportability, and the morals or ethics reflected in it. In this sense these particular linguistic forms are the cohesive means for the
speaker to be able to construct a coherent product. 1987:15 Bamberg starts with the investigation of particular linguistic contrasts and then explores the
narrative functions that they serve. His particular interests are “establishing and shifting temporal reference” and “switching and maintaining [participant] reference”. The research
method he used was “picture book narration” and his twenty-five German-speaking subjects were aged between 3:6 and 10:1 years; they were using their mother tongue. His is
clearly a developmental study and in introducing it he says: To sum up, we know that a variety of forms that serve the function of contextual cuing in
adult narratives, are made use of by children in a similar way in interactive discourse, before such forms are used in monologue-like discourse of narration at the age of three to
four. Further, we know that three to four-year old children already have some notions of globally coherent narrative schema [sic], but do not seem to be able to filter this schema
down to the level of forming the appropriate sequential segments so that a locally cohesive interpretation comes into existence. This explanatory gap calls for a detailed study of the
- 55 - growth of linguistic devices that are used for discursive purposes, and the functions these
devices serve as children of different ages begin to strategically employ them in their own productions of cohesivecoherent discourse. 1987:17
Many of his conclusions do not concern us directly. His study of the perfectpresent tense contrast and the pronominalnominal contrast is used as a basis for the investigation of
“the use of grammatical devices in a variety of contexts for a variety of functions.” His aim is to discover the “discourse processes that are involved in the ‘making’ of the child’s
grammar, as well as in the changes in the reorganization” of that grammar as the child matures 1987:202.
Our aims are clearly somewhat different; the first is to characterize the data collected, not only in terms of evaluation, but also in terms of temporal sequencing and participant
reference. In section 2.4.6 p. 51 we mentioned disordered temporal sequencing and ambiguous pronominal reference as examples of faulty plot construction which are found
in the narratives of the less able subjects. The second aim is to offer explanations for the obvious differences in the narrative skills of the eight subjects. Some of these differences
have to do with developmental factors, and these will be discussed in detail as we proceed. Others have to do with factors inherent in the interactive situation, such as interference
from the interlocutor and general breakdown in communication because the speaker does not have the necessary expository skills to proceed any further with the task of telling.
2.6 Summary
