Narrative analyses routinely investigate autobiographical and interview data. This book examines narratives-in-interaction co-constructed by participants in formal mediation sessions, by asking how many of the five cases in the videotaped data display the adversarial narrative pattern pervasive within the interpersonal conflict literature, and secondly what other narrative patterns may be present, and how do they work? Focusing simultaneously at the utterance level and the macro-levels present within the larger dispute context, this book reveals situated communicative practices by which interlocutors interactively construct, resist, reproduce, and intertextually transform adversarial narratives to produce outcomes consonant with their underlying interests. In contrast to the dramaturgical model traditionally used in narrative research, this book illuminates the emergent, microgenetic character of narrative development.

This case study reports the first investigation of a young deaf child’s experiences with books. It describes six steps in a developmental sequence of seven stages, from simply labeling pictures and signs to reading independently. One of the most interesting aspects of development was the child’s spontaneous analysis of sign drawings in storybooks that illustrate each word with a sign. These sign drawings provided a bridge between signed and spoken discourse and print. Concepts she discovered about books include: stories are to be enjoyed and repeated; they are means both of social interaction and of private satisfaction; characters have styles of speaking and books have narration and dialogue; stories have plots. Concepts about print relate to directionality, letter patterns, and that print, signs, and speech interrelate.

Examination of a profoundly deaf child’s fingerspelling in more than 100 hours of interaction videotaped at intervals over six years reveals a gradual acquisition of the rules for fingerspelling and knowledge of the relation of fingerspelling to signs and to printed and spoken words. Some similarity is found to the (written) spelling of pre-school children who develop their own orthography (Read 1975). This case study of finger-spelling development may provide clues to the role of hearing in language and to the acquisition of a spoken-written language by those who cannot hear it.

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Although it is well known that the English writing skills of deaf individuals are usually considerably inferior to those of hearing peers, there is a need for information on the exact nature of their difficulties and of the effects of different linguistic elements on writing success. Deaf and hearing children at two grade levels (fourth and eighth) provided written texts for an analysis of text structure and quality. Deaf writers used as many cohesive devices as hearing writers but not as many different lexical items per device. Hearing readers who ranked the texts discussed the effectiveness of different devices in relation to coherence and intelligibility, focusing on vocabulary, information presentation, and coherence. Their attempts at comprehension followed a search for unexpressed relational propositions in order to account for text connectedness and coherence that were unrelated to the structural devices of cohesion. The deaf children’s texts are discussed in terms of possible language transference (from American Sign Language) and individual interlanguage.