Narratives play an important role in education, both as a genre which is employed to assay language competence and as a way of conveying educational context. Hence, it is important to have a clear idea of how children approximate narrative tasks. This inquiry centered on children between 8 and 10 years of age. It explored whether children with a Flemish background told stories in a distinct way from children with a non‐Western background. Second, it looked into the way both groups of children fitted their stories to the assumed knowledgeableness, i.e. the communal common ground (Clark 1996) they ascribed to their audience. This inquiry displays that children with a non‐Western background did not diverge greatly from children with a Flemish background in the way they told stories to an adult, but that significant differences could be found in the way they fitted their stories to a peer listener. Whereas children with a Flemish background expanded more when telling to a peer, children with a non‐Western background displayed no significant adaptations. The inquiry briefly debates some of the implications of this finding for education.