Narrative is central to children’s learning. They use it as a tool to help them organise their ideas and to explore new ideas and experiences. Composing stories, whether told or written, involves a set of skills and authorial knowledge but is also an essential means for children to express themselves creatively and imaginatively.
The range of narrative that children will experience and create is very wide. Many powerful narratives are told using only images. ICT texts tell stories using interactive combinations of words, images and sounds. Narrative poems such as ballads The Highwayman tell stories and often include most of the generic features of narrative. Narrative texts can be fiction or non-fiction. A single text can include a range of text types, such as when a story is told with the addition of diary entries, letters or email texts.
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Purpose:
The essential purpose of narrative is to tell a story, but the detailed purpose may vary according to genre. For example, the purpose of a myth is often to explain a natural phenomenon and a legend is often intended to pass on cultural traditions or beliefs.
Link to:
Units by year group
Progression paper on narrative
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| Generic structure | Language features | Knowledge for the writer |
The most common structure is:
- an opening that establishes setting and introduces characters;
- a complication and resulting events;
- a resolution/ending.
Effective writers are not constrained by predictable narrative structure. Authors and storytellers often modify or adapt a generic structure, e.g. changing chronology by not telling the events in order (time shifts, flashbacks, backtracking). Children can add these less predictable narrative structures to their own writing repertoires. |
Language features vary in different narrative genres.
Common features:
- presented in spoken or written form;
- may be augmented/supplemented/partly presented using images (such as illustrations) or interactive/multimedia elements (such as hypertext/images/video/audio);
- told/written in first or third person (I, we, she, it, they);
- told/written in past tense (sometimes in present tense);
- chronological (plot or content have a chronology of events that happened in a particular order);
- main participants are characters with recognisable qualities, often stereotypical and contrasting (hero/villain);
- typical characters, settings and events are used in each genre;
- connectives are widely used to move the narrative along and to affect the reader/listener:
- to signal time (later that day, once);
- to move the setting (meanwhile back at the cave, on the other side of the forest);
- to surprise or create suspense (suddenly, without warning).
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- Decide on your intended style and impact.
- Plan before writing/telling to organise chronology and ensure main events lead towards the ending.
- Visualise the setting and main characters to help you describe a few key details.
- Rehearse sentences while writing to assess their effectiveness and the way they work together.
- Find some different ways of telling what characters think and feel, e.g. describe what they did or said.
- Use some strategies to connect with the reader/listener, e.g. use repetition of the same phrase or the same language pattern; ask them a question or refer to the reader as ’you’. What on earth was happening? Who do you think it was?
- Show how the main character has changed or moved on in some way at the end.
- Read or listen to the whole text as if you are the reader/listener or try it out on someone else: check that it makes sense and change anything that could work better.
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Links to units by year group
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