The book adopts a crosslinguistic and crosscultural approach to narrative analysis. Concepts of narrative are explored through a contrastive study of its expressions in English and Chinese and through a comparison of the contexts of production. Narratives written by Grade 5/6 students were collected from primary schools in Sydney and in Hong Kong. Their structural, ideational and stylistic characteristics were contrasted within a synthesized framework of Western and Chinese narrative traditions, the Labovian model, Halliday s systemic functional grammar, critical discourse analysis and genre...