ABSTRACT
Even within stories for children (as within those by and with) we can observe and contrast many sub-types: spoken or written; face-to-face or ‘removed’ (e.g. radio or cassette); one-to-one or one-to-many; sponta neously constructed or text-dependent or scripted; and many more, in numerous distinct combinations. Even with everything else held constant except the prompt or priming, significant differences can emerge: Stein and Albro (1997) have found that children ‘primed’ with a story opening about a big grey fox produced considerably more complex narratives than when given a story ‘stem’ to elaborate about a little boy or girl. So the potential dimensions of situational variation are numberless. But a very useful preliminary categorization of situations can be achieved by consid ering Halliday’s three macro-dimensions of discourse, which he calls the field, mode, and tenor of the discourse.
