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Article published In:
Methodology of Narrative Study: What the first thirty years of Narrative Inquiry have revealed
Edited by Allyssa McCabe and Dorien Van De Mieroop
[Narrative Inquiry 31:1] 2021
► pp. 147–162

Children’s narrative interactions

Practices – competences – acquisition

| TU Dortmund University
| WWU University of Münster

This contribution traces which aspects of narrative acquisition have been emphasized in 30 years of Narrative Inquiry. It then uses this synopsis as a starting-point to present a theoretical and empirical framework which can be characterized by some of the aspects that have attracted less attention in the journal so far. The summary of this consistent interactive approach and some of the results of about 40 years of respective research, based on different corpora, should support the idea that taking up these aspects is worthwhile. Investigating a broad range of age-groups and comparing a variety of contexts, including peer-interaction and classrooms, as well as different genres such as conversational narratives of personal experience and fantasy stories, with a perspective on inter-individual differences, not only expand our knowledge about narrative acquisition, but lead to a new coherent resource-based explication of central concepts such as narration, competence and acquisition.

Keywords: interaction, acquisition, practices, narrative competence, genres, longitudinal study, context, contextualization, personal narratives, fantasy stories
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Thirty years of research on narrative acquisition in Narrative Inquiry (NI)
    • Fields covered by NI in the research area of narrative development
    • Hitherto underrepresented aspects of narrative acquisition in NI
  • Narrative practices as resources for narrative skills – and the other way round
    • Narrative interaction in different contexts, genres and media
    • Resources in communication and acquisition
    • Inter-individual differences in resources and development: facets of narrative competence
  • Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 29 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20103.qua
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