Storytelling in Conversation

Analyzing Storytelling In TESOL Interview Research

“…CA's distinctive approach to storytelling, originally developed by Harvey Sacks in his 1964–1972 lectures (Sacks, ) and seminal publications by Sacks (e.g., 1974, 1986) and Gail Jefferson (e.g., 1978, 1984), brought attention to the ways in which stories are locally occasioned through the preceding talk, recipient‐designed, jointly accomplished by tellers and recipients, and interactionally consequential. Later work has further elaborated the earlier analyses and documented a wide range of storytelling practices and resources, including co‐tellings, recipient (dis)alignment and (dis)affiliation, embodied action and multimodality, and affect construction (for concise summaries, see Liddicoat, ; Mandelbaum, ; Sidnell, ; Wong & Waring, ). Although CA research on storytelling concurs with narrative inquiry regarding the epistemological status of stories as packages of knowledge and experience, CA has brought to light the important role of storytelling as doing social actions such as accounting, complaining, blaming, and justifying, and constructing identities and social relationships in the here‐and‐now of the ongoing talk.…”

“…In the following talk, John pursues further, possibly stronger, and more elaborate recipient responses. Mandelbaum () notes that “producing further talk by reference to the story, or recycling elements of the story, ‘recompletes’ it, making available another opportunity for recipients to respond to it after initial lack of uptake” (p. 505). As one method of response pursuit, John makes explicit affective claims and attributions: I just like so mad I just did that (45), £I never thought of that I thought it was so funny.£ (50–51), but I didn't realize that he was so scare after that (53–54).…”

The development of L2 interactional competence: evidence from turn-taking organization, sequence organization, repair organization and preference organization

“…Julie reacts with minimal acknowledgement tokens (line 7), and then immediately opens her own telling (from line 9 on): Empirical work on ordinary L1 conversation has documented that speakers typically design the first turn-constructional unit (TCU) of a storytelling so as to display its fittedness to the ongoing conversation (Jefferson 1978;Mandelbaum 2013;Sacks 1974). This is illustrated in Excerpt 1, which occurs after two months of Julie's stay with the host family.…”

Storytelling as adaptive collective sensemaking

“…It is one of the most widespread social activities through which people in different cultures share personal memories (e.g., Fivush, 2011;McBride, 2014) and cultural information (e.g., Boyd, 2009;Currie & Sterelny, 2017;Donald, 1991;Dunbar, 2010;Scalise Sugiyama, 2001). In its canonical form, storytelling is a collaborative conversational activity focused on the production of narrative discourse (Mandelbaum, 2013), whereby a narrator typically recounts a sequence of past events, including protagonists' actions, and how they contribute to changing an initial situation (Bruner, 1990;Labov & Waletzky, 1967). Members of the audience participate in the activity by reacting to the tellings or guiding them (Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2000;Hirst & Manier, 1996).…”