Purpose: To tell a story, entertain, teach, or share cultural values

 

Organization: 

• The organization of fictional narratives can vary depending on the type (e.g., realistic fiction, fables)

• Fictional narratives begin with an orientation that introduces the central character(s) and introduces when and where the story begins. It may also include information that foreshadows a crisis, complication, or problem.

• The story is organized into a sequence of events that includes (typically) a problem, crisis, resolution, and conclusion

 

Features of fictional narratives:

• Include elements of suspense and disruption; suspense typically builds to a crisis point, then the crisis is resolved

• Have major and minor characters which are developed through showing the characters' internal qualities (traits, feelings, motives, etc.) and external attributes (age, gender, ethnicity, etc.)

 

Types of fictional narratives: Fables/fábulas, historical fiction/ficción histórica, realistic fiction/ficción realista, fairy tales/cuentos de hadas, legends/leyendas

 

Steps to Writing a Fictional Narrative:

1. Identify the topic

2. Define the problem

3. Develop the characters

4. Develop the plot

 

Language features: 

• Verb conjugation: Past tense 

• Grammatical person: 3rd person (it/they) 

• Verb groups, which communicate what is happening, with a variety of both: 

  • verb types (action, saying, sensing, or relational)

  • verb choice (beyond "said," "went," "got," "was," etc.)

• Noun groups, which communicate who or what is involved in the activity and typically include descriptive informal details 

  • (e.g., "I could feel the hot sun on my skin and see the bright blue sky"; from Eight days: A story of Haiti)

  • Include modifiers, i.e., determiners ("the earthquake"), adjectives ("bright red polish"), prepositional phrases ("murals that tell our history"; from My Papi Has a Motorcycle), appositions ("his wings are green, orange, and gold, like the fruit"; from Mango, Abuela, and Me), non-finite clauses ("the new homes replacing the last of the critrus groves"; from My Papi Has a Motorcycle), embedded or relative clauses ("Mercedes López, the fastest runner in our class"; from My Papi Has a Motorcycle)

  • Some modifiers are adverbials (which say something about the verb in a sentence), and some are adjectives (which say something about the nouns or pronouns in a sentence

  • Logical connections like conjunctions (and, but, etc.) and words that signal time or order of events help the text hang together and help students pack information into each sentence