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In this article Caswell and Duke draw on case studies of two struggling readers/writers who found a "way in" to the world of literacy through non-narrative texts to argue for greater attention to non-narrative in early literacy education.
In US schools, narrative texts dominate early elementary school curricula. Learning to read is often a process of learning to read fictional narrative, and learning to write is often a process of learning to write personal narrative. While there are no empirical findings about the distribution of textual forms in early literacy curricula, there are estimates that as many as 90% of the texts elementary school children encounter are narrative in form (Stein & Trabasso, 1982).
As literacy instructors and supervisors in the Harvard Literacy Laboratory, we also have tended to focus our early literacy instruction primarily on narrative forms of discourse. Our recent experiences with two particular students, however, piqued our interest and prompted us to re-examine this practice.l These two students were motivated to read and write specifically non-narrative texts and, in fact, found a "way in" to the world of literacy through non-narrative texts that they had not found through narrative forms of discourse. Despite having very different profiles as literacy-learnersone a working-class student with a history of learning disabilities, the other an immigrant child from a non-literate home approaching reading and writing in English as a second language-there were remarkable similarities in the ways in which these students progressed as readers and writers once the focus of their instruction turned to non-narrative texts. These similarities prompted us to explore possible reasons for the positive effect of non-narrative on the students' literacy development.
We found that the reasons given for providing greater attention to non-narrative texts in the early grades typically centered on a single rationale: More experience with non-narrative texts in the early grades may help mitigate the difficulties many students encounter with these texts later in schooling. This rationale was supported by existing literature, which suggests that post-primary school students' traditionally poor performance with non-narrative, expository texts (e.g. Applebee, Langer, Mullis, Latham, & Gentile, 1994; Langer, Applebee, Mullis, & Foertsch, 1990) may be in part the result of their lack of experience with these texts in the crucial early years of...