A study of the narrative structure of six to seven year-old-children of two different social classes

This study is a discourse study focusing on the narrative structure. The writer intended to find out the story structure of the narratives of children from two different social classes, namely high social class and low social class. There are six children taken as the informants of the study. Those children are at the age of six to seven years old. Three children are from high social class and three children are from low social class. This study is a qualitative research with the design of the interaction analysis In this study, there are two types of data. The first data is the retold stories in which they are asked to retell the three stories that they have heard from the cassettes given by the writer. The three stories are Tiga Babi Kecil, Semut dan Merpati and Harta Karun Yang Tertinggal. The second data are spontaneous stories. In this spontaneous story, the children tell the most unforgettable experience that they ever had in the past. From the data analysis, the writer finds out that in terms of story elements, the two different social classes children do not demonstrate any marked differences. Generally, their story elements consist of orientation, complicating action and resolution. An evaluation is always left while telling the story. It might be caused that children at six to seven years of age unable to give a moral lesson. Besides, most of them think that evaluation is not a story. So when they are asked to tell a story they often lef the evaluation. While in terms of the story structure, the researcher finds out that there are no significant differences in the story structures of the stories told by the children coming from two different social classes. They exhibit the same orders. The orders are orientation followed with a complicating action and then end with a resolution and sometimes they end the story with a closing