I think we may be talking to some degree at cross-purposes. And
certainly I'm not arguing for an exclusive emphasis on narrative stories
in children's early reading and writing. I entirely agree that children
enjoy and benefit from encountering a much wider range of written genres.
My point was that I believe Bruner is correct in giving primacy to
narrative in the child's early experience _in the terms in which he makes
the distinction_. Of narrative, he writes: "It deals in human or
human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences
that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the
particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and
place." And of the paradigmatic, "The paradigmatic mode, by contrast,
seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for
abstraction, and in the end disclaims in principle any explanatory
value at all where the particular is concerned." Later on the same
page he adds, "Scientists, perhaps because they rely on familiar
_stories_ to fill in the gaps of their knowledge, have a harder time
in practice. But their salvation is to wash the stories away when
causes can be substituted for them." (1986, p.13, emphasis added) In this
context, see also Harold Rosen's "Stories and Meanings" (National
Association for the Teaching of English, UK, 1984).
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.