Assignment #6 Chapter 9 Narrative writing

In the early part of this chapter, Prof. Tompkins mentions that “Children use narrative writing to create both fictitious and true stories that entertain readers (Tompkins, 2008, p.194)”. I think that this definition is interesting because the author said the narratives are written to “entertain” readers. It is important for the readers being entertained by reading the narratives, and that exciting experience from reading would make the readers feel the importance of making enjoyable written works. That is, only the person who knows delightful feeling of interesting narratives can produce interesting narratives: you should be able to understand the nature of reading to write a good piece of work. And this is especially important for the children readers because they are prospective readers and writers for more developed written works in the future when they are grown up.

This point is related to another point which the author talks about the children’s ability of comprehending the stories. She says that even young children have basic sense of what story is. Thus, it can be said that giving the children joyful experience of reading the stories is very important because we cannot ignore unconscious power of the children in perceiving certain stories, even when they do not have ability with literacy yet.Also, to make the children learners to get the sense of what story is more precisely, she insists necessity of teaching them basic elements of stories. Prof. Tompkins introduces plot, setting, characters, theme, point of view as the basic elements of stories. I think that by learning these concepts the children would be able to expand their ability to understand the world more because literature is a device for reflecting the human world. By analyzing the stories according to those elements, the children might be able to have more critical way of looking at the world.

She goes on to introduce literary device which are used in writing process, but I think this could be a little difficult for the children to use naturally because they are novice writers. Also, Prof. Tompkins talks about exploration activities for teaching the element of story structure, and there are ten of them: Class collaboration retelling of stories, retelling and telling stories, retelling stories in writing, dramatizing stories, drawing story diagrams, comparing versions of stories, creating open-mind portraits, writing dialogue, retelling stories from different point of view. I think that these strategies would be especially helpful for the young children to think creative because these could provide opportunities to twist preexisting ideas from the works for the children. And I think this training could provide the basis for the children to become creative writers.

Reference:Tompkins, G. E. (2008). Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product. NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Here are some interesting articles about this chapter.
http://www.thewritingsite.org/resources/genre/narrative.asp

Response to Sun-Mi Kim:
She said children make progress, they will write a more complex story plot that includes a conflict between characters describing their mental states, increase story cohesion using conjunctions, and present more vivid pictures of a story by skillfully using a literary device such as metaphors, similes, and symbols, etc. Thus, in teaching teachers need to provide developmentally appropriate scaffolding strategies to meet different levels and needs of the students. I think this paragraph is good response to chapter 9 Narrative Writing, and my opinions also same with her.