Article published In:
Journal of Narrative and Life HistoryVol. 2:3 (1992) ► pp.187–217
Developing Autonomy for Tellers, Tales, and Telling in Family Narrative Events
Abstract
Dinner-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)
References (40)
Bernstein, B. (1964). Elaborated and restricted codes: Their social origins and some consequences. American Anthropologist, 66(Part 2), 55–69. 
(1971). Class, codes and control: Vol 1. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1989, October). Conversational structure of children's oral narratives. Paper presented at the Boston University Child Language Conference.
(1990). You don't touch lettuce with your fingers: Parental politeness in family discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 14(2), 259–288.
Blum-Kulka, S., & Sheffer, H. (in press). The metapragmatic discourse of American-Israeli families at dinner. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bruner, J. (1985). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J., & Lucariello, J. (1989). Monologue as narrative recreation of the world. In K. Nelson (Ed.), Narratives from the crib (pp. 73–97). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Engel, S. (1986). Learning to reminisce: A developmental study of how young children talk about the past. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Fisher, W. (1987). Human communication as narration: Towards a philosophy of reason, value and action. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3. Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic.
Harré, R. (1984). Personal being: A theory for individual psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
(1986). The book as narrative prop in language acquisition. In B. Schieffelin & P. Gilmore (Eds.), The acquisition of literacy: Ethnographic perspectives (pp. 16–34). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Kay, P. (1977). Language evolution and speech style. In B. Blount & M. Sanchez (Eds.) Socio-cultural dimensions of language change (pp. 21–35). New York: Academic.
Labov, W., & Fanshel, D. (1977). Therapeutic discourse. New York: Academic.
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts: Proceedings of the 1966 meeting of the American Ethnological Society (pp. 12–44). Seattle: American Ethnological Society.
McCabe, A., & Peterson, C. (1991). Getting the story: A longitudinal study of parental styles in eliciting narratives and developing narrative skill. In A. McCabe & C. Peterson (Eds.), Developing narrative structure (pp. 217–253). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Miller, P., Fung, R., Hoogstra, L., & Mintz, J. (1990). Narrative practices and the social construction of self in childhood. American Ethnologist, 171, 292–309.
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 38(Serial No. 149).
((Ed.)). (1986). Event knowledge: Structure and function in development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Olson, D. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 471, 257–281.
Polanyi, L. (1985). Telling the American story. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983). Narrative fiction. New York: Methuen.
Sachs, J. (1990, July). Young children's awareness of presuppositions based on community membership. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, Budapest.
Schieffelin, B. B., & Eisenberg, A. R. (1984). Cultural variation in children's conversation. In R. L. Schiefelbusch & J. Pickar (Eds.), The acquisition of communicative competence (pp. 378–420). Baltimore: University Park Press.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (1981). Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Snow, C. E. (1983). Literacy and language: Relationships during the preschool years. Harvard Educational Review, 531, 165–189.
(1984). Parent-child interaction and the development of communicative ability. In R. L. Schiefelbusch & J. Pickar (Eds.), The acquisition of communicative competence (pp. 69–107). Baltimore: University Park Press.
(1991). Building memories: The ontogeny of autobiography. In D. Cicchetti & M. Beeghly (Eds.), The self in transition: Infancy to childhood (pp. 213–242). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Snow, C. E., & Dickinson, D. (1990). Social sources of narrative skills at home and at school. First Language, 101, 87–103.
(1991). Skills that aren't basic in a new conception of literacy. In A. Purves & T. Jennings (Eds.), Literate systems and individual lives: Perspectives on literacy and schooling (pp. 175–213). Albany: SUNY Press.
C.E., Snow, & C. Ferguson, ((Eds.). (1977). Talking to children: Input and acquisition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Snow, C. E., & Goldfield, B. (1982). Building stories: The emergence of information structures from conversation and narrative. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics 1981 Analyzing discourse: Text and talk (pp. 127–141). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
(1983). Turn the page please: Situation-specific language learning. Journal of Child Language, 101, 551–570.
Snow, C. E., & Tabors, P.O. (1989, October). Parental versus child responsibility for the structure of oral narratives. Paper presented at the Boston University Child Language Conference.
Tannen, D. (1985). Relative focus on involvement in oral and written discourse. In D. R. Olson, N. Torrance, & A. Hildyard (Eds.), Literacy, language and learning (pp. 124–148). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Watson-Gegeo, K. A., & Boggs, S. T. (1977). From verbal play to talk story: The role of routines in speech events among Hawaiian children. In S. Ervin-Tripp & C. Mitchell-Kernan (Eds.), Child discourse (pp. 67–90). New York: Academic.
Wells, G. (1985). Preschool literacy-related activities and success in school. In D. R. Olson, N. Torrance, & A. Hildyard (Eds.), Literacy, language and learning (pp. 229–256). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, D. (1985). Ways of telling: Text repertoires in elementary school children. Journal of Education, 1671, 70–86.
Cited by (61)
Cited by 61 other publications
Kupersmitt, Judy R., Sveta Fichman & Sharon Armon-Lotem
2024. Causal Relations and Cohesive Strategies in the Narratives of Heritage Speakers of Russian in Their Two Languages. Languages 9:7 ► pp. 248 ff. 
Pham, Hoa & Janet S Gaffney
2023. Unfinalizability: An exploration of a young child’s emergent identities through living stories. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood ► pp. 146394912311698 ff.
Alduais, Ahmed, Issa Al-Qaderi & Hind Alfadda
2022. Pragmatic Language Development: Analysis of Mapping Knowledge Domains on How Infants and Children Become Pragmatically Competent. Children 9:9 ► pp. 1407 ff.
De Geer, Boel & Tiia Tulviste
2022. Behaviour regulation in the family context in Estonia and Sweden. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 329 ff.
Quasthoff, Uta & Juliane Stude
Slonecker, Emily M. & J. Zoe Klemfuss
2020. Caregiver-child reminiscing and recounting across contexts. Cognitive Development 56 ► pp. 100947 ff.
Wei, Ran, Kathryn A. Leech & Meredith L. Rowe
2020. Decontextualized language use during Chinese and American caregiver-child interactions. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 71 ► pp. 101214 ff.
Kingston, Helen Chen, James S. Kim, Mary Burkhauser, Bethany Mulimbi & David M. Quinn
2019. Chapter 3. Do children’s oral retellings of narrative and informational texts predict scores on a standardized reading comprehension test?. In Narrative, Literacy and Other Skills [Studies in Narrative, 25], ► pp. 89 ff.
Minami, Masahiko
2019. Connecting L1 and L2 acquisition: From the perspective of macro and micro narrative structure. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 35:2 ► pp. 143 ff.
Mages, Wendy K.
2017. Drama-based interventions and narrative. In The Routledge International Handbook of early Literacy Education, ► pp. 296 ff.
Mages, Wendy K.
2018. Does theatre-in-education promote early childhood development?. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 45 ► pp. 224 ff.
Gordon, Cynthia
2015. Narratives in Family Contexts. In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, ► pp. 311 ff.
Prediger, Susanne, Uta Quasthoff, Anna-Marietha Vogler & Vivien Heller
2015. How to Elaborate What Teachers Should Learn? Five Steps for Content Specification of Professional Development Programs, Exemplified By “Moves Supporting Participation in Classroom Discussions”. Journal für Mathematik-Didaktik 36:2 ► pp. 233 ff.
Laible, Deborah & Tia Panfile Murphy
2014. Constructing moral, emotional, and relational understandings in the context of mother–child reminiscing. In Talking about Right and Wrong, ► pp. 98 ff.
Quasthoff, Uta & Elke Wild
2014. Learning in context from an interdisciplinary perspective. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 3:2 ► pp. 69 ff.
Bova, Antonio & Francesco Arcidiacono
2013. Investigating children’s Why-questions: A study comparing argumentative and explanatory function. Discourse Studies 15:6 ► pp. 713 ff.
Bova, Antonio & Francesco Arcidiacono
2014. “You must eat the salad because it is nutritious”. Argumentative strategies adopted by parents and children in food-related discussions at mealtimes. Appetite 73 ► pp. 81 ff.
Aarts, Rian, Serpil Demir & Ton Vallen
2011. Characteristics of Academic Language Register Occurring in Caretaker‐Child Interaction: Development and Validation of a Coding Scheme. Language Learning 61:4 ► pp. 1173 ff.
Bogetic, Ksenija
2011. Interruptions and the dyadic co-narration of shared experiences in English and Serbian conversation. Language & Communication 31:4 ► pp. 318 ff.
Lai, Wen‐Feng
2010. ‘Talking like a book?’ Socioeconomic differences of maternal conversational styles in co‐constructing personal narratives with young Taiwanese children. Early Child Development and Care 180:10 ► pp. 1361 ff.
Perregaard, Bettina
2010. ‘Luckily it was only for 10 minutes’: Ideology, discursive positions, and language socialization in family interaction1. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14:3 ► pp. 370 ff.
Rimé, Bernard
2009. Bibliographie. In Le partage social des émotions [Quadrige, ], ► pp. 393 ff.
Stavans, Anat, Elite Olshtain & Gil Goldzweig
2009. Parental perceptions of children's literacy and bilingualism: the case of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 30:2 ► pp. 111 ff.
Dayan, Yael
2008. Towards professionalism in early childhood practicum supervision – a personal journey. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 16:2 ► pp. 153 ff.
Yifat, Rachel & Sara Zadunaisky-Ehrlich
2008. Metapragmatic comments indexing conversational practices of preschool children in institutional discourse. First Language 28:3 ► pp. 329 ff.
Yifat, Rachel & Sara Zadunaisky-Ehrlich
2008. Teachers' Talk in Preschools During Circle Time: The Case of Revoicing. Journal of Research in Childhood Education 23:2 ► pp. 211 ff.
Snow, Catherine E. & Diane E. Beals
2006. Mealtime talk that supports literacy development. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 2006:111 ► pp. 51 ff.
Nicolopoulou, A Geliki & Elizabeth S. Richner
2004. ‘When Your Powers Combine, I am Captain Planet’: The Developmental Significance of Individual- and Group-Authored Stories by Preschoolers. Discourse Studies 6:3 ► pp. 347 ff.
Tryggvason, Marja-Terttu
2004. Comparison of Topic Organization in Finnish, Swedish-Finnish, and Swedish Family Discourse. Discourse Processes 37:3 ► pp. 225 ff.
Bylund, Carma L.
2003. Ethnic Diversity and Family Stories. Journal of Family Communication 3:4 ► pp. 215 ff.
Mistry, Jayanthi & T. S. Saraswathi
2003. The Cultural Context of Child Development. In Handbook of Psychology, ► pp. 267 ff.
Hemphill, Lowry, Paola Uccelli, Kendra Winner, Chien-ju Chang & David Bellinger
2002. Narrative Discourse in Young Children With Histories of Early Corrective Heart Surgery. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45:2 ► pp. 318 ff.
Bellelli, Guglielmo, Antonietta Curci & Giovanna Leone
2001. Social and Cognitive Determinants of Collective Memory for Public Events1. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology, ► pp. 625 ff.
Leichtman, Michelle D, David B Pillemer, Qi Wang, Aashiyana Koreishi & Jessica Jungsook Han
2000. When Baby Maisy came to school. Cognitive Development 15:1 ► pp. 99 ff.
Aronsson, Karin
1999. Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 31:2 ► pp. 287 ff.
Forrester, Michael A.
1999. Reflections and Projections of the Developing Self. Theory & Psychology 9:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
McHale, James P. & Alyson Neugebauer
1999. Preschoolers' characterizations of multiple family relationships during family doll play. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 28:2 ► pp. 256 ff.
Aukrust, Vibeke Grøver & Catherine E. Snow
1998. Narratives and explanations during mealtime conversations in Norway and the U.S.. Language in Society 27:2 ► pp. 221 ff.
Hemphill, Lowry & Catherine Snow
1998. Language and Literacy Development. In The Handbook of Education and Human Development, ► pp. 169 ff.
Wiley, Angela R., Amanda J. Rose, Lisa K. Burger & Peggy J. Miller
1998. Constructing Autonomous Selves through Narrative Practices: A Comparative Study of Working-Class and Middle-Class Families. Child Development 69:3 ► pp. 833 ff.
Wiley, Angela R., Amanda J. Rose, Lisa K. Burger & Peggy J. Miller
1998. Constructing Autonomous Selves through Narrative Practices: A Comparative Study of Working-Class and Middle-Class Families. Child Development 69:3 ► pp. 833 ff.
Crago, Martha B., Alice Eriks-Brophy, Diane Pesco & Lynn McAlpine
1997. Culturally Based Miscommunication in Classroom Interaction. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 28:3 ► pp. 245 ff.
Imbens-Bailey, Alison L. & Catherine E. Snow
1997. Chapter 7 Making meaning in parent-child interaction: A pragmatic approach. In The Problem of Meaning - Behavioral and Cognitive Perspectives [Advances in Psychology, 122], ► pp. 261 ff.
Norrick, Neal R.
1997. Twice-told tales: Collaborative narration of familiar stories. Language in Society 26:2 ► pp. 199 ff.
NORRICK, NEAL R.
2004. Humor, tellability, and conarration in conversational storytelling. Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 24:1
Norrick, Neal R.
2013. Stories of vicarious experience in speeches by Barack Obama. Narrative Inquiry 23:2 ► pp. 283 ff.
Norrick, Neal R.
2019. Collaborative Remembering in Conversational Narration. Topics in Cognitive Science 11:4 ► pp. 733 ff.
Norrick, Neal R.
Norrick, Neal R.
Snow, Catherine E. & Alison Imbens-Bailey
1997. Beyond Labov and Waletzky: The Antecedents of Narrative Discourse. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7:1-4 ► pp. 197 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra
1996. The audience shaping of text-strategies in spoken discourse: Adults vs. children addresses and the case of Modern Greek. Journal of Pragmatics 25:5 ► pp. 649 ff.
Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps
1996. NARRATING THE SELF. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:1 ► pp. 19 ff.
Pesco, Diane & Martha Crago
1996. "We Went Home, Told the Whole Story to Our Friends": Narratives by Children in an Algonquin Community. Journal of Narrative and Life History 6:4 ► pp. 293 ff.
Berman, Ruth A.
1995. Narrative Competence and Storytelling Performance: How Children Tell Stories in Different Contexts. Journal of Narrative and Life History 5:4 ► pp. 285 ff.
wilson, Andrew J. & David Zeitlyn
1994. Speech acts and Stiles. Linguistics and Education 6:1 ► pp. 91 ff.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1993. “You gotta know how to tell a story”: Telling, tales, and tellers in American and Israeli narrative events at dinner. Language in Society 22:3 ► pp. 361 ff.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1994. The Dynamics of Family Dinner Talk: Cultural Contexts for Children's Passages to Adult Discourse. Research on Language & Social Interaction 27:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Mistry, Jayanthi
1993. Cultural Context in the Development of Children's Narratives. In Cognition and Culture - A Cross-Cultural Approach to Cognitive Psychology [Advances in Psychology, 103], ► pp. 207 ff.
Reese, Elaine, Catherine A. Haden & Robyn Fivush
1993. Mother-child conversations about the past: Relationships of style and memory over time. Cognitive Development 8:4 ► pp. 403 ff.
Snow, Catherine E.
1993. Families as social contexts for literacy development. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 1993:61 ► pp. 11 ff.
[no author supplied]
2005. General Bibliography. In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ► pp. 518 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.