Storytelling as a Cultural Practice
Pedagogical and Linguistic Perspectives
Jeanette Hoffmann (Volume editor)
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Contributors
- Storytelling as a Cultural Practice – Pedagogical and Linguistic Perspectives: An Introduction
- I Storytelling throughout the course of life, and within different social and media contexts
- Children’s Own Stories as Representations of the Self and Their Views of the World
- Public Storytelling in Finance: The Societal Practice of Having Narratives Emerge
- New Narratives in the Online-Offline Nexus
- II Storytelling with, and in, picturebooks
- Storytelling with Picturebooks in Multilingual Contexts of South Tyrol (IMAGO)
- Wordless Picturebooks, Narrative Scaffolding and the Acquisition of Narrative Skills: A Usage-Based Approach to How Children Construct a Story
- Telling TALES about Nature in English L2: Selecting and Performing Picturebooks for Children
- Multimodal Storytelling in Panel Readings
- Creating Stories Within Stories: Typewriters in Contemporary Picturebooks
- III Storytelling in children and young adults’ drawings, writings and reading
- Narratives as Compositions of Pictorial and Linguistic Elements: Potentials of the Documentary Interpretation of Children’s Image-Text-Narrations
- Between Imagination, Convention and Corporeality: Written Storytelling as an Aesthetic Learning Process
- The Space Between: A Posthuman Approach to Reader’s Response
- IV Storytelling in English language teaching and teacher education
- Interactional and Cognitive Aspects of Storytelling in English Language Acquisition
- Oral Storytelling Pedagogies in Teaching English to Young Learners: Implications for English Language Teacher Education
- Storytelling, a Pedagogical Device in Higher Education
- V Storytelling in specialised discourse
- Once Upon a Time in Science: Storytelling and the Narrative Spectrum
- Narrative Medicine and Medical Narratives: Marfan Syndrome between Definition, Description and Narration
- Paths in Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A Contrastive Analysis of Phrasal Patterns in English, Italian and Ladin
Emilia Petrocelli and Sergio Pizziconi1
Interactional and Cognitive Aspects of Storytelling in English Language Acquisition
Abstract (English): The study investigates the relationship between Bruner’s (1996) nine universals of narrative realities and the explicit knowledge of the phases of oral narratives (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972) in the context of English Second Language (ESL) learning. We based our analysis on a collection of stories told and transformed by 32 upper-intermediate university students. The contributors were asked to tell a personal anecdote before and after being lectured on the phases of storytelling. The thus produced data showed that abstract and coda appear mostly in the second versions. Evaluative sections are extended, and forms of embedded evaluation are developed. Conversely, the narrative content in orientation, complicating action and resolution stays almost unchanged. This makes us argue that Bruner’s universals mainly address those phases of Labov and Waletzky’s oral narratives comprising the bulk of the story, rather than the more interlocutor-oriented ones, namely abstract, coda, and – to a different degree – evaluation.
Keywords: storytellingEnglish as a foreign or second languagenarrative universalsphases of oral narrativesKeywords: storytellinginglese come lingua straniera o secondauniversali narrativifasi della narrazione orale.Abstract (Italiano): Lo studio analizza il rapporto tra i nove universali delle realtà narrative di Bruner (1996) e la conoscenza esplicita dalle fasi della narrazione orale (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972) in contesti di apprendimento dell’Inglese L2. Il corpus di analisi raccoglie le storie di 32 studenti universitari di livello upper-intermediate raccontate prima e dopo lo studio delle fasi della narrazione orale. I dati evidenziano che l’abstract e la coda sono più frequenti nella seconda versione. Vengono estese le sezioni valutative sia esplicite sia interne. Al contrario, il contenuto narrativo delle orientation, complicating action e resolution appare già nelle prime versioni e resta pressoché immutato. Ciò porta a ipotizzare che gli universali di Bruner determinino per lo più le fasi delle narrazioni orali relative al contenuto della storia e meno quelle orientate verso l’interazione, ovvero abstract, coda e, in grado diverso, l’evaluation.
1.Storytelling in second language learning
Since the pioneering work on oral storytelling by Labov and Waletzky (1967) and Labov (1972), the study of narratives has attracted increasing attention in sociolinguistics (Norrick, 2000, pp. 1–66 and pp. 135–168; Thornborrow & Coates, 2005, pp. 1–16 and pp. 67–88) and in other humanities. Bruner (1986, 1996) argued that reality itself is narratively constructed and stories play a central role in mediating human experience and action.
Storytelling has been misconceived as being most beneficial for young children (Wright, 2000, p. 93), so the study of narrative skills in other learning contexts has not been frequent, especially in higher education second language teaching. Some of the few studies investigating the use of storytelling in ESL in secondary and higher education all agree that using narratives is beneficial for students (Guoying & Xiaolin, 2019).
Consequently, storytelling has become a fundamental part of our second-year English Language and Translation course for the Intercultural and Interlinguistic Mediation Bachelor’s degree. Learning to tell stories tackles many aspects of our syllabi: adequacy to the forms of written and spoken English; adjustment to the context (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, pp. 3–14); attention to the nature of the communicative event; focus on the degree of text planning and organisation.
Also, higher-level learners who especially aim at improving sociopragmatic skills for mediation can benefit from Labov and Waletzky’s model as a meaningful aid to increase awareness of narrative patterns in interaction. In this regard, Jones (2001; 2012) describes Eggins and Slade’s (1997, pp. 38–39) narrative features, based on Labov and Waletzky’s model, and uses them as a frame to propose consciousness-raising activities to help students become aware of the phases of oral narratives in conversation.
To our knowledge, research on the acquisition of the phases of oral narratives in ESL contexts was only carried out in the context of two studies. Özyilidrim (2009) examined oral and written narratives of Turkish university students in terms of Labov and Waletzky’s model and found a similar organisational pattern in both versions. Allami and Ramezanian (2019) collected stories told by learners with different competence levels who received no formal teaching on the phases of oral narratives. Interestingly, nobody used abstract and coda.
Therefore we investigated how explicit knowledge connects to students’ abilities to organise experience and frame their stories coherently with the interactional context. The study stems from the necessity to contribute to the still little research on narratives produced by ESL learners, especially in higher education. In particular, it means to offer more information on the acquisition of the phases of oral narratives in ESL learning contexts. The novelty of our study is thought to lie in the attempt to integrate Labov and Waletzky’s model with Bruner’s universals of narrative realities (1996, pp. 133–144) as a theoretical lens to observe ESL learners’ storytelling activities.
Details
- Pages
- 390
- Publication Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034348331
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034348348
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783034345057
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21689
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (July)
- Keywords
- Storytelling Pedagogy Linguistics Imagination Picture books Media Reception Reading Engagement Discourse Analysis Multimodality Self-representation
- Published
- Lausanne, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, New York, Oxford, 2024. 390 S., 20 farb. Abb., 6 s/w Abb., 22 Tab.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
Biographical notes
Maria Cristina Gatti (Volume editor)
Jeanette Hoffmann (Volume editor)
Maria Cristina Gatti (PhD) is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where she also directs the Center for Academic Writing. She is an advisory member of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue (CID). As an applied linguist, she is currently leading research programmes on narrative in multilingual and multicultural settings, the role of English in multilingual education and professional environments, and language variation in transnational communication contexts. Jeanette Hoffmann (PhD) is Full Professor of German Literature Didactics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where she also directs the EduSpace Children’sLiteratureLab. Previously, she was Full Professor at the Technische Universität Dresden and worked at the University of Education Upper Austria and the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests are graphic storytelling, reading engagement, literary learning and language education in multilingual and intercultural contexts.
