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- Volume 2, Issue, 1992
Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 2, Issue 3, 1992
Volume 2, Issue 3, 1992
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Developing Autonomy for Tellers, Tales, and Telling in Family Narrative Events
Author(s): Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Catherine E. Snowpp.: 187–217 (31)More LessAbstractDinner-table conversations are contexts in which children become socialized to local cultural rules regulating storytelling and may be able to achieve autonomy in telling stories, as tellers of stories, and in the content or tale recounted. Conversations from five American and five Israeli middle-class families and five American working-class families matched on family constellation generated 33, 40, and 15 narratives, respectively. Each of the groups demonstrated a different pattern on dimensions such as who participated in telling narratives, who initi-ated narratives, and how secondary narrators participated; Israeli family narra-tives were more collaborative but with relatively little child participation, whereas American middle-class children participated more by initiating their own narratives and American working-class children narrated in response to adult elicitation. All three groups demanded fidelity to truth and coherence in the tales children told, but many more of the narratives told in Israeli families had to do with events known to all the family members, whereas American children told stories about events unfamiliar to at least some family members. (Communication)
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Narrative Competence: Cross-Cultural Comparisons
Author(s): Vera John-Steiner and Carolyn Panofskypp.: 219–233 (15)More LessAbstractIn a series of cross-cultural studies of narratives by children and adolescents, we examined thematic variations as well as cohesive devices. Our subjects ranged from 5 to 15 years of age. Our initial study included Black, Hispanic, and Native-American participants. We used a story-retelling task for comparative analysis.We found that children between ages 5 and 8 substantively increased the quantity and accuracy of their retold narratives. We also found thematic differ-ences among stories by children from the different speech communities, which suggested coherent cultural schemas specific to each ethnic group. Native-Amer-ican students, who reconstructed stories on the basis of pictorial cues, also revealed strong cultural and tribal variations in their narratives.In follow-up studies, we examined the relationship between narrative compe-tence and narrative cohesion. Our subjects (ranging in age from 8 to 11) were drawn from public school groups of English-speaking American students and Hungarian public school students. In the retold stories of these two groups, we found that the Hungarian students demonstrated a more artful storytelling style, employing a greater variety of cohesive devices and establishing a more coherent narrative experience than did the American students. (Linguistics, Education)
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Narrating and Listening in Kindergarten
Author(s): Katharina Mengpp.: 235–252 (18)More LessAbstractIn this article, some major results of a longitudinal study on preschool children's narrative development are presented. Narrative development is seen as the acqui-sition of narrative competence, that is, the knowing how narrator activities and listener activities are reciprocally interrelated. Both narrator and listener have to carry out characteristic joint tasks in the phases of narrative units. In the initiation phase, they have to deal with embedding the narrative unit in the ongoing conversation; in the realization phase, they have to create and maintain prerequisites for the listener's understanding, to present and reconstruct the event sequence, to mark and reconstruct the narrator's perspective, and so on; in the closing phase, they have to compare the narrator's and the listener's perspectives on the events presented. The data base for the study consists of narrative units taken from everyday conversations in one kindergarten group recorded over a 3-year period beginning when the children were 3 and ending when they were 6 years old. The narrative units are analyzed and interpreted in order to find out how the children ap-proached and solved the tasks typical for narrating and listening at the ages of 3, 4½, and 6 years. (Linguistics)
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Peer Co-Narration: Changes in Structure of Preschoolers' Participation
Author(s): Barbara Bokuspp.: 253–275 (23)More LessAbstractThis article represents the interactional approach to the study of child narration. The analyses reveal the process of story creation by children in the roles of narrator and co-narrator. In building a narrative text alone (solo narration) or together with another child (co-narration), the child transmits new information to the peer listener about the adventures of storybook heroes. Nine hundred and sixty children ranging in age from 3 to 7 years took part in the investigation (384 in narrator and co-narrator roles and 576 in listener roles). A modified version of Peterson and McCabe's (1983) method of narrative analysis was used. The results showed that co-constructed narratives underwent change with age in reference complexity (greater change than in solo constructed ones). Co-narrator contributions were analyzed in terms of (a) new reference content (introducing new reference situations), and (b) operations upon the partner's text (in various categories mainly confirmational and supplementary). The dominant partner in introducing new content was the initiator of the dis-course, whereas the dominant one in performing text operations was the con-tinuer. Changes across the age span were found in both types of co-narrator contribution. These results showed the changing structure of preschoolers' par-ticipation in co-narrative discourse. (Psycholinguistics)
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Collaborators and Critics: The Nature and Effects of Peer Interaction on Children's Conversational Narratives
Author(s): Alison Preecepp.: 277–292 (16)More LessAbstractThis article examines the reactions of three young children to the narratives they spontaneously created and told to, and with, each other during daily 40-min drives to and from school. The data consist of 90 hr of recorded conversations spanning an 18-month period. The nature and effects of their comments to the narrator(s) are explored. The children are found to assume roles as both critics and as collaborators and to facilitate and support each other's efforts to create and tell a rich variety of narrative forms. Parallels with the role of adults in fostering narrative growth are noted. (Psychology qualitative, ethnographic analy-sis)
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Children's Storytelling in Adult-Child Interaction: Three Dimensions in Narrative Development
Author(s): Heiko Hausendorf and Uta M. Quasthoffpp.: 293–306 (14)More LessAbstractThis article addresses the questions: (a) What kind of discourse abilities children need in order to produce conversational narratives?; (b) In what order are these abilities acquired?; and (c) How do children acquire these abilities in interaction with adults? The first question is dealt with by means of a descriptive model that represents different knowledge domains working jointly in narrative interaction. The next question is addressed through empirical findings resulting in three dimensions of developmental progress. The answer to the final question deals with the explanatory aspect in terms of possible developmental mechanisms underlying the observed patterns of adult-child interaction. (Linguistics)
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