Narrative Comprehension and Story Grammar

Every text has an underlying structure which has a vital contribution in making it a meaningful whole. Awareness of a text’s structure therefore is significant in deriving the sense of the text. Story grammar offers a simple and effective framework to analyze a coherent structure in narrative texts, hence is assumed to facilitate the comprehension of narratives. The research has been designed to be a descriptive study, with the objective to explain and illustrate how story grammar can function in constructing and decoding meanings in a narrative text, and, to highlight the scope of story grammar in pedagogy. A short story text has been randomly selected from the short story collection in the English text book by Punjab text book board for Intermediate level. A three stepped comprehensive analysis of the sample text has been done by implementing the selected story grammar model. It has been found that story grammar helped in deriving a coherent structure from the short story text; hence it has pedagogical implications in developing narrative comprehension.