ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that formal instruction plays a critical role in helping children develop a higher level of organisational skills in narratives. A text organized in the iterative patterns focuses on one constant given information throughout the discourse, such as the themes marked gray in the diagram. Narratives performed by first graders provide significant information about the transformational stage of their verbal development as they enter the bigger community from their home environment. The chapter presents a discourse analysis on how 64 first graders with Mandarin Chinese as their first language responded to some oral narrative tasks. Pedagogical suggestions are discussions for school teachers to help first graders cope with narrative structures required for schooling. The narrative development of a child is found to be closely linked with their emergent literacy abilities. The connection between children's narrative ability and their literacy development had been found among Mandarin Chinese-speaking children.
