Narrative writing in grade 1: A case-study of students’ re-design of story elements

En fallstudie om elevers re-design av berättelseelement

Abstract

In this case study, seven grade 1 students’ narrative pair-writing is analyzed in two writing situations. The two situations differ by different learning resources staged to draw students’ attention to several story elements. Based on a design-theoretical frame­work, I examine how the students’ situated interest is prompted towards the story elements and how the students, through conversations and writing, re-design story elements.

The analysis is carried out in three phases where 1) story elements are identified, 2) the prompts of the elements in the various learning resources, model text and two graphic models, are put in relation to each other, and 3) the possible functions of the story elements in a narrative are problematized. The material consists of three learning resources, transcriptions of the students’ conversations during the writing processes, their written texts and transcriptions of subsequent pair interviews where the students reflect on their writing and on stories.

The findings show that the different learning resources offer the students different expressions for story structures and that they are re-designed with a variation of single- and multi-episodical structure in the different writing situations. Students also show a consistent interest in building tension and recast story elements such as character dialogue to achieve this. The narrative perspective, which according to previous research tends to shift in young students’ stories, is consistently in third person. It reflects how the learning resources model narrative perspectives in both writing situations. Even though a “red thread” is conceptualized in one of the graphic models, students find it difficult to specify how a “red thread” is realized in a story. Their proposals are instead examples of fairy tales without a “red thread”. Like previous studies, it is also shown that the students’ writing processes are characterized by a strong focus on the local text level, even though the learning resources prompt towards other story elements.