The presence of elements of connection and temporal progression in written narratives: a look at the national school reality

Abstract

The narrative text is the highest unit of communication whose length varies and whose prin-cipal objective is communication (Pérez & Vega, 2001). When constructing a narrative text, students principally go about constructing and linking ideas (Shiro, 2001). This type of text is a complex and deeply heterogeneous unit (Adam & Lorda, 1999). It is noteworthy that a narrative text must always have a series of logical events, connected in such a way that they will be able to follow a development of ideas that will necessarily explain some other event. The present study examines the performance of children in their fourth year of schooling in municipal, subsidised, and private schools, with respect to their use of connective elements and temporal progression in the production of written narratives. The sample consists of 300 narrations extracted from the corpus of the national applied writing exam (SIMCE, 2009). On this basis, connective and verbal structures present in the written narratives were anal-ysed in light of linguistic structures that were validated in accordance with the theoretical framework of the study. The results obtained indicate that textual connectives and elements of temporal progression present in the written narrations of the children studied are deter-mined by the type of school that the children attend. In particular, the subsidised establish-ments are characterized by a greater use of verbal structures while municipal schools present a greater use of connectors linked to the central development of the story.