Research Approaches to Narrative, Literacy, and Education
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RESEARCH APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE, LITERACY, AND EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Narratives rest at the core of human activity and relationships. Since ancient times, scholars and thinkers have conceptualized and analyzed narratives from diverse disciplinary perspectives. In this chapter, we define narrative as a genre of oral discourse that characterizes and facilitates culturally determined ways of communicating lived or imaginary events to others. We see narrative as a linguistic tool that represents ideas and past actions in memory, structures and evaluates present experiences, and helps humans make sense of the world around them. Loyal to this definition, narrative, literacy, and education are intimately intertwined, as early narratives lay the foundation for literacy development, and literacy, in turn, is the cornerstone of a successful formal education. Here we review past and current work addressing children’s narrative development and the connections between their oral narrative abilities and the skills necessary for their ultimate educational success. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
The study of oral narrative has its roots in structuralist investigations of written narrative. In one of the earliest works, Morphology of the Folk Tale, Propp (1928), a Russian scholar, analyzed the basic plot components of fairy tales to derive their simplest irreducible narrative elements. Nonetheless, the most influential study for the contemporary narrative orientation used in the present review is the one conducted by Labov and Waletzky (1967). Their seminal work was first presented in the spring of 1966 as a conference paper in the meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Breaking from the long-standing tradition of studying written narratives, Labov and Waletzky paved the way for the investigation of oral stories of personal experience, that is, of narratives in their everyday context. Their work focused mostly, as had Propp’s (1927), on the structural aspects of narratives. They outlined the basic units of narrative analyses (e.g., clauses) and formulated their basic structure and organization (i.e., high point analysis). Although Labov and Waletzky’s investigation was conducted with adults, it became a springboard for study of children’s conversational K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 151–163. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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GIGLIANA MELZI AND MARGARET CASPE
narratives. As with adults, main questions of this early work focused on both the basic structural elements of children’s narratives and how these were organized into a cohesive story. Within this field of research, two main perspectives emerged. In one view, scholars grounded in cognitive psychology conceptualized narratives as part of a larger cognitive domain and, as such, they considered children’s narrative abilities to be linked to the development of specific cognitive skills (e.g., Stein and Glenn, 1979). In the second, scholars ad
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