Urban isiZulu meets African storytelling: narrative structure in 10-12 year old children’s narrations of two wordless picture books.

Abstract

This research looks at the narrative structure of bilingual (L1-isiZulu/L2-English) 10-12year old children and their use of “Conflict-Resolution Pairs” to advance the plot of a narrative, an element in Stein and Glenn’s (1979) story grammar. It seeks to help build our youth in the foundation phase, aims at humanising our education system, to enhance literacy development and thus academic achievement alongside a preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in South Africa by reducing the misalignment between the language(s) of teaching and learning and the learners’ home language(s). The curriculum and assessment tools in South Africa are modelled on the basis of a ‘Western’ narrative text structure. This research seeks to highlight, that narratives which do not follow this structure are not necessarily incoherent and that the children are not limited in their storytelling capacities, but that perhaps the techniques being used to test these children are not tailored to accommodate their narratives, which may instead follow a language specific narrative text structure as proposed by Tappe and Hara (2013). Our language backgrounds influence our storytelling skills. The employ of cultural familiarity in the selection of educational materials can assist with interpretation, understanding and the formulation of proficient narratives. This research and many other pieces of research may serve as stepping stones and building blocks in the foundation towards the common goal to create new assessment tools and curricula in South Africa that take into consideration the specific language background of all South African children.