READING NARRATIVE TEXTS

Students read a variety of written, spoken and media texts for pleasure and to learn, some of which are narrative. Narrative texts include novels, short stories, some poetry, and other texts that tell a story.

As they move on through the secondary grades, the narrative texts students read should:

  • reflect a balance between self-selected titles and titles chosen by others

  • move from young adult literature to a balance of texts written for adolescents and adults

  • include and equal representation of titles written by male and female authors

  • feature characters that reflect the diversity of modern Québec culture

DIVERSE TEXTS FOR DIVERSE READERS

Young adult literature offers a wealth of different text types and genres. Some of these include:

Verse Novels

Verse novels are novel-length narrative texts written in free verse and poetry. These texts make use of different forms of poetry such as shape poems, and simple or complex stanzaic verse forms. These texts often have multiple narrators and may include narration, dialogue and descriptions.

Dystopian Novels

Dystopian YAL is a sub-category of science fiction and features young adults in dystopian settings. These novels often feature unique settings that present complex social, political and global issues mixed with romance. Dystopian YAL protagonists are often young people embarking on a type of hero’s quest.

Illustrated Texts

This category includes picture books, both wordless and multimodal, and illustrated novels as well as graphic novels. Illustrated texts incorporate image and text and make use of elements of graphics in addition to the conventions of their genre. Texts include graphic memoirs, realistic graphic novels, multimodal fantasy novels that incorporate illustrations and images, as well as multigenre and multimodal narrative nonfiction.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Québec Reading Connection offers a database of a variety of texts that have been selected for Québec students.

LITERACY TODAY IS UNDERSTANDING THE WORD AND THE WORLD.

© 2023, Literacy Today