From Implicit to Explicit: Literacy and the Oral Narrative within ESL Classrooms

Implicit knowledge is one of the most important forms of knowledge available to teachers of language (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1982; 1986; Richmond, 1990). In the teaching of narrative writing, while many opportunities are given to students to write narrative, resulting "stories" might contain no evidence of the crucial move to describing a dramatic disruption of the on-going events that lead to a final resolution in a narrative (Riley and Reedy, 2000). There is a significant amount of available literature showing that narratives have an inherent structure (Propp, 1968; Labov and Walezky, 1967; Labov, 1972; Fitzgerald and Teasley, 1986; Berman and Slobin, 1994). This paper reports the findings of a controlled experiment carried out in Kenya where girls aged between 15 and 18 to whom English was taught as a Second Language participated. The findings suggest that activating implicit knowledge of narrative structure by the use of the traditional oral narrative has the potential to improve literacy in general and the teaching of writing in particular within secondary schools especially where English is taught as a Second Language.