7 Stories
As children develop, the content of their conversation gradually moves from observations and comments about the here and now to a more ‘decontextualised’ discussion about absent people and things involved in past or future events. Conversation begins to provide the platform, and the motivation, to take longer and longer solo turns in conversation; these eventually develop into narratives. Narratives are essentially connected passages relating a sequence of events, real or imaginary – in other words, a story.
The first thing to note is the universality of storytelling itself (see Figure 3). It occurs in every known society, whether literate or not, and can take many forms; poems, chants, rhymes, fables, songs, dance and can be about almost anything; overcoming a monster, rags to riches, a quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy or rebirth. Whether these stories are about mythical heroes or the pet dog, what unties them are the way people organise them, usually as a meaningful sequence of events set in a time and place, with some problem or tension that gets resolved.
Narrative structure often follows a prototypical form, with an onset, an unfolding and a resolution. Storytelling is a complex skill, requiring the narrator to keep track of what is being said from word to word (so that the sentences make sense) as well as paragraph to paragraph (so that the plot makes sense). The beginning is typically a brief statement of what the story is about, providing the ‘who, where and when’ of the action to follow. The unfolding is the centre of the story and consists of one or a series of complicating actions that lead to a high point, and then to the resolution or result.
Children aged 3–4 years display very primitive narrative structure; sometimes providing two or three dynamic events related in time but, more typically, storytelling consists of lists of unrelated referents and events. Later on in development, children are able to organise ‘chains’ of events ordered in time. These tend to focus on the most salient scenes, rather than the events that advance the story. By 5 years old, half of children give adverbial sequencers like ‘then’, ‘and then’ or ‘next’. By approximately 8 years of age, more children begin to use adverbial time clauses and create complex relationships between events (Pearson and Ciolli, 2004).
Among the many stories analysed by McCabe and Peterson (1991), one frequently seen category includes those that end at the high point (i.e. do not manage to bring the story to a resolution). At the most mature stage, children ensure that the causal sequence of the whole story makes sense at a global level, and that events relate to an initial goal and an attempt to reach the goal. The outcome is reached with respect to the goal and includes evaluative commentary. With these multiple components to introduce and coordinate it is not surprising that many of the elements of successful storytelling and narration are still developing as children move into adolescence (Hickmann, 2003).