Narrative and narrativization of a journey: Differences between personal and fictional narratives

Background: Scholars depict a deep connection between the way children remember their personal past and imagine the present and the future (Vygotskji, 2004; Brockmeier, 2015). Nevertheless, several studies indicate that children are prone to relate well-formed stories about past personal events but report difficulties in constructing narratives from fictional events. Objective: The present study aims to investigate the differences between school-aged children’s personal and fictional narratives about a journey, considering different types of stories they structured. Methods: 220. 8 to 10-year old children randomly divided into three groups, performed a narrative on a journey: 70 narrated a memory on a journey, 92 narrated an ideal trip and 58 narrated a fictional story from a given orientation. The presence and the type of complicating action were assessed to investigate children's ability to present well-structured narratives. Results: The results showed that children were more able to construct stories with complicating action when they narrated personal events and when they were scaffolded by an incipit. Furthermore, in fictional narratives with incipit, children narrated multiple Complicating action creating a continuous violation of canonicity. Conclusions: The authors discuss the results considering the difference between narrative and narrativization of personal and fictional events and the importance of scaffolding children’s narrative skills.