Looking over Halliday and Painter's work on early language development I
just cannot see narrative as privileged. Chldren apprentice into the
system through pragmatic (goods and services) and mathetic (commenting
on, naming) functions... and then up to pre-school engage in
conversations that involve a range of genres... including recount, but
retelling experience is just one of among many processes.
In our literacy work in Australia, if anything, we found narrative to be
privileged - against a range of factual genres that might be useful
across the curriculum, in secondary school or in the community. It was
privileged because of the way progressive pedagogy meshed with romantic
humanist notions about children - through whole language or process
writing. I tend to agree with Bernstein that this pedagogy serves the
needs of one middle class fraction - his new middle class, agents of
symbolic control, and that foregrounding narrative is part of this
service. We've been working to balance things out, by introducing a
broader range of genres.
Jim Martin