This study investigates the effect of experimental situations on written stories. Eighty first to fourth graders were asked to write stories under four different situations: free story production, oral/written story production from a sequence of pictures, and reproduction of a story read to the child. The 320 collected stories were hierarchically classified according to their textual organization. Also, each child had her/his performance analyzed across situations. The conditions had an effect on the stories produced: stories with a high level of narrative schema were those produced from both a sequence of pictures and a story read to the child. This effect was not observed among the third and fourth graders whose stories were of a higher level of narrative structure in all conditions. Each child was assigned to one of the three levels of narrative competence. Thus, the domain of narrative structure develops even after the formal instruction on reading and writing.
Experimental situations; written stories; narrative development
