Integration of narration and argumentation in the retelling of narrative texts

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyse the presence of narrative structural elements of the history of a children's literary text in children's stories, analyse the argumentative schemes that they implement when they justify both the actions of the characters and their own positions on what happened in the story. Forty five students, 25 girls and 20 boys between 6 and 10 years old participated in this research (M = 8.10, SD = 0.9); from first to fifth grade of the elementary school of a school in the city of Bogotá (Colombia). The corpus used in this report was composed of 1152 statements in 655 speaking turns. The quantitative analyses through chi-square account for significant differences for the mean of narrative structural elements, narrative categories and argumentative schema by grade level. The results are discussed highlighting that the use of narration and argumentation converges gradually and that these types of discourse together favour the re-tellings of narrative texts.