Narrative Skills and Social Class

Abstract

Narratives play an important role in education, for pragmatic and theoretical reasons. Narrative skills of four-year-old children are hypothetically important for later school success. This research investigated the relationship between specific narrative skills and social class in a culturally and racially homogeneous sample, focusing particularly on narratives of economically disadvantaged children from disorganized households. Both middle-class and economically disadvantaged children (but not economically disadvantaged children from disorganized households) often produced long and informative narratives. In contrast, children from disorganized households were most likely to produce extremely minimal narratives, and even their longer ones tended to be chronologically disorganized and poorly patterned in terms of overall structure. Since narrative is one building block teachers use pedagogically, such differences in the match between child skills and school demands at school entrance are cause for concern.