ABSTRACT
In examining development over a range of ages and ethnicities, one should not restrict the definition of narrative too quickly to what may be a culturally biased norm or to one that would preclude early productions. Thus, narrative is defined quite broadly in this approach. Narratives usually concern real or pretend memories of something that happened and therefore are often largely in the past tense. However, there are also hypothetical, future-tense narratives and others given in present tense. Narratives often contain a chronological sequence of events, but one can also find narratives that contain only a single event or those that skip around in time. Narrative usually refers to a kind of language, although there are musical, pictorial, and silently dramatic narratives (McCabe, 1991a). Narrative is a linguistic crossroads of culture, cognition, and emotion and serves the dual functions of sense making and self-presentation (McCabe, 1991a, 1996a). In addition, because narrative forms dominate in elementary school reading and writing assignments, children’s expertise in oral narrative helps them make the transition from oral to written language (Dickinson & McCabe, 1991, 1993).
