ABSTRACT

As children grow, their linguistic resources for meaning-making increase through engagement in an ever-increasing set of culturally appropriate practices – they learn to greet people, to follow instructions, to ask for things they want and to express feelings – and their language develops as a growing resource for meaning-making through interaction in social contexts. In many cultures, they engage with rhymes and songs and stories, and learn to differentiate them. With repeated exposure and social interaction, perhaps through a parent reading a story at bedtime or through regular storytime sessions at nursery, children learn to recognise certain language events as stories; they expect to be introduced to characters and a setting – whether this is three little pigs in a make-believe land, or Katie Morag on a Scottish island, or James in an apartment in Toronto. They expect something terrible to happen – their house to be destroyed by the big bad wolf, granny’s tractor to break down or the subway train to stop in James’ living room – and, through a series of events, they expect a resolution, so that life resumes, safely and happily. In building up these expectations of how stories develop, children are developing an understanding of the stages through which the ‘story’ genre unfolds, of the construals of characters and events expected at each stage, and of the language that realises them and the transitions between stages.