Narrative skills and genre knowledge: Ways of telling in the primary school grades

Children in the preschool years develop a linguistic repertoire of narrative skills as they adapt their ways of representing events to different occasions of language use. The present study examines the abilities of primary school children to draw upon their repertoire of narrative skills in the service of language tasks. Children in grades K-2 were shown a shortened version of the silent film, The Red Balloon , and were asked to perform three narrative tasks: (a) produce an on-line narration of a 3-minute segment from the film, (b) recount the film's events as a news report, and (c) recount the film's events as an embellished story. The narrative texts produced for each task were subjected to analyses of linguistic markers of genre differences. The findings revealed very subtle distinctions between the narrative texts produced for the three genre tasks, leading to the conclusion that primary grade children have only nascent ability to apply their genre knowledge to school language tasks.