It is at this point that children could talk on and on and on, if their mothers allowed them to do so.
– Rice Balls and Bear Hunts: Japanese and North American Family Narrative Patterns
Each researcher first identified child leapfrogs, which were defined as instances of child utterances that disrupted the chronological sequence of the story.
– But What About the Beginning? Young Children’s Independent Narrative Structure and How Mother’s Promote Chronological Coherence During Narrative Conversations
The narrative is a text type. Definitions of what a narrative is range from the technical to the intuitive. A narrative is often also referred to as a story. Students must be able to read, understand and produce narratives. Understanding the structure, content, purpose and ways of training narration will be useful to help students narrate better.
At the primary school level, the open-ended comprehension passage of Paper 2 is typically a narrative which students have to read and understand. Primary school students would have need for producing narratives in writing (Situational and Continuous Writing) and speech (Stimulus Based Conversation).
Dictionary.com refers to a narrative as an “account of events, experiences or the like, whether true or fictitious” as well as “a story that connects and explains a carefully selected set of supposedly true events, experiences, or the like, intended to support a particular viewpoint or thesis”. A straightforward account of events is a narrative but not a story and is better referred to as a recount. A story on the other hand has to connect and explain a carefully selected set of events to promote a viewpoint.
Some researchers have studied the structure of narratives and others have studied how to help students produce better narratives.
An example of the former category is Boyd et al. (2020). They attempted to discover if all narratives had the same basic structure. They did this through a systematic text analysis approach. Another example would be McCabe and Peterson (1984): What Makes a Good Story? who analysed 288 “oral narratives” of young children.
At this stage, it would be important to note that Boyd et al. (2020) whose study has been described as “A massive, first of its kind text analysis study” (Bergland, 2020), highlighted that among “Narrative theorists, philosophers, literary scholars, linguists, and countless other disciplines”, there is a “general consensus” that “the structure and content of stories are independent”.
Students are marked on content separately from language (which includes structure).
Continuous writing is theme-based writing. The theme matters greatly. Structure-based planning approaches (introduction, rising action, problem, climax, resolution, conclusion – more on this later) would help with structure. The 5 Keys Approach (in-house) is a theme-based approach which would help with theme-relevant content.
Then (in 1984 and much earlier) and now (as recently as 2020), researchers (and experts) are in agreement that a story must have a problem. The solving of the problem is the story. McCabe & Peterson (1984) put it this way, “people are favourably impressed by narratives filled with emotional commentary about sophisticated problem solving that includes detailed descriptions of what objects and events were involved”.
Boyd et al. (2020) confirmed that “traditional” stories generally have the following structure, “stage setting” (who, what, where), “plot progression” and “cognitive tension” (having a goal to solve the problem, facing challenges and overcoming those challenges).
McCabe & Peterson (1984) highlighted that stories can be thought of as “episodes”. The better episodes are those which show the characters’ motivations (why they do what they do), how they try to achieve their goals and crucially, the consequences of their “attempts”. A more complex episode would be when “two people …have goals and influence each other”.
McCabe and Peterson also referred to another understanding of what a good story is, known as the High Point developed by William Labov and his colleagues. In this understanding, a good story, after an introduction “builds up to a high point through the recapitulation of events and then often suspends the action at this crisis point … then the resolution of this crisis is provided…”. This high point is an emotional high point (Minami & McCabe, 1995). Crucially Labov was of the view that a story cannot merely provide a reader with information but must lead to a larger point of learning (McCabe & Peterson, 1983).
Before we leave the discussion on structure, it is interesting to know the origins of what is learnt today as The Story Mountain. Recall that Boyd et al. (2020) set out to test if narratives today follow the same basic structure. This structure was introduced in 1863 by the German novelist Gustav Freytag as the Freytag Pyramid in his book Technique of The Drama, An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art (Bunting, 2020).
Researchers say that children as young as “two years old” (Eisenberg, 1985 as cited in Kelly & Bailey, 2013) are able to narrate or retell events past. McCabe and Peterson (1983) explained how children’s story telling abilities develop – very young children tell stories in a “leapfrog” fashion – that is stories which are “narratives containing related events that are told out of temporal sequence” (Kelly & Bailey, 2013). They then progress to being able to give recounts in chronological order. They are then able to share stories which end just after a climax. At the final stage of progression, they are able to tell a story with a “clear resolution”.
Kelly et al. (2020) had the following recommendations for mothers (they cited research which shows that mother-child interactions are important for children to develop their narration abilities) to help young children whose narratives can be more coherent (in sequence) – these children skip parts of the story which are important for the story to make sense to the hearer.
When children are narrating verbally in a way which skips important events, mothers could interject with questions or phrases denoting time such as “before x” and ‘after x”. They could correct indirectly by asking either open-ended “What did …” or close-ended “Did …” questions. They could direct correctly with statements which provide important details. When the child goes off the theme of the conversation, mothers could take over the role of the story-teller – “monologue”. They could also “reconnect them to the topic” by bringing them back to where they had left off.
Kelly et al. (2020) citing other researchers, cautioned against using monologue too much because “controlling maternal strategies are related to child attachment insecurity in childhood and into adolescence”.
Researchers also appear to be in agreement leapfrogging may not always be bad since not all cultures prize the same way of story-telling. The linear, sequential form is prized in “European-American communities” (Kelly et al., 2020). A study (Mimami & McCabe, 1995) compared the interactions of Japanese mother-child pairs with Canadian mother-child pairs.
They found that Canadian mothers were very verbally interactive with their children. They asked questions to probe for more details on the places and people in their children’s stories. They also asked questions which shaped their children’s narration as it developed. This resulted in “often lengthy stories that detail single experiences and revolve around the solution of some problems”.
In contrast, Japanese mothers often shaped their children’s narration with utterances which suggested that they understood without their children needing to fill in the details. This was in line with the Japanese concept of omoiyari – “for a person to put himself or herself in someone else’s position and understand that person’s feelings” (Doi 1971; 1973, Lebra, 1976; Azuma, 1986 as cited in Minami & McCabe, 1995). Therefore, young Japanese children tended to “tell concise stories that are cohesive collections of several experiences” (Minami & McCabe, 1995).
The best stories require a leap of faith.
The Brain Dojo
