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Article published In:
Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 30:2 (2020) ► pp.427–450

Storytelling and stance-taking in group interaction

| Sheffield Hallam University

This paper looks at two highly prevalent actions in naturally-occurring talk: stance-taking and storytelling. Stance-taking and storytelling have been shown to co-occur often (e.g. Siromaa, 2012), and this is especially the case in reading group talk, a discursive environment in which speakers are engaged in the joint enterprise of assessing the meaning and quality of a shared object: a written narrative text (e.g. a novel). Insights from conversation analysis and dialogic syntax are used to analyse interactional data from several reading group meetings, with a focus on the types of storytelling that are found in this talk, the relationship between the various stories told in sequence in the talk – including the relationship between the written narrative text and the spoken narratives, and the ways in which stance-taking and storytelling are intertwined.

Keywords: conversation analysis, dialogic syntax, group interaction, second stories, stance, storytelling
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • Social reading and reading groups
    • Storytelling and stance
  • Analysis
    • Retelling the written text
    • Written text as “first story”
    • Integrated analysis
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.18078.pep
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