Children's Use of Speech and Repetition in Oral Storytelling: The Role of Cultural Patterning in Children's Retellings of First Nations Oral Narrative

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a classroom of culturally diverse grade one students who participated in a First Nations cultural education program focused around traditional oral storytelling. The data reveal particular forms of narrative skills that these children were exploring in this context. Through a “verse analysis” of stories told to the children by a First Nations cultural educator and an analysis of the retellings of these stories by the children, we found that both the educator and the students employed a patterned use of speech and repetition to achieve particular rhetorical effects. We argue that examining children's participation in these particular forms of narrative practice provides evidence relevant to theories of cognitive development as a process of cultural participation, and it extends theoretical conceptions of children's narrative development to incorporate additional dimensions related to understandings of narrative form, evaluation, and the role of affect and the social context.