Abstract:
The investigation of narrative skills in children is significant in many respects; amongst other
things, narratives can yield information about a child’s use of decontextualised, literate
language features (Curenton and Justice 2004) while simultaneously providing access to the
child’s level of competence concerning narrative-specific aspects. Narrative abilities have been
linked to literacy development and academic achievement (Dickinson and Tabors 2001) and
are often used to predict language progress (Botting, Faragher, Simkin, Knox and Conti-
Ramsden 2001). Moreover, narrative skills constitute an area of verbal language development
in which delays are difficult to compensate (Girolametto, Wiigs, Smyth, Weitzman and Pearce
2001, Manhardt and Rescorla 2002). However, in multilingual settings the assessment of
narrative skills cannot be restricted to language proficiency measurements in each of a child’s
languages. Rather, this assessment needs to include “linguistic descriptions of ethno-linguistic
discourse patterns (contrastive rhetoric)” (Barnitz 1986:95) in order to assess the roles which
cultural knowledge and language-specific narrative text structure elements play in the
development of narrative skills in multilingual children. This article discusses the necessity to
identify such language-specific elements of story structures. Empirical findings are presented
which illustrate that 10- to 12-year-old children from Malawi exhibit narrative practices while
they retell visually and aurally presented stories. It appears that these narrative practices are
influenced by African folktales. The children’s retellings in both Chichewa and English cannot
simply be measured by canonical narrative text structures commonly used in academic settings.
The global significance of such a discussion is reflected by a growing concern that academic
success may be compromised by a misalignment between the narrative practices in a child’s
primary language(s) and the narrative practices in a respective language of teaching and
learning (e.g. Makoe and McKinney 2009, Souto-Manning 2013).
