Storytelling and stance-taking in group interaction
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.
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
-
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