Cultural features of performance in Norwegian children’s narratives

Trude Hoel

doi:10.7577/nbf.473

Abstract

This article presents part of a research project whose aim is to investigate Norwegian 6–7-year-old children’s language use in story-telling. The data consist of the children’s oral texts based on a wordless picture book. By studying creative and stylistic features of the children’s narratives, I attempt to shed light on cultural interaction and socio-cultural factors as fundamental contributors to those narratives. The aim of this article is to contribute to the exploration of a culturally anchored perspective on narratives in light of the reading culture prevailing at Norwegian kindergartens.

Highlights

Narratives involve the use of language for communicative purposes
Structure and purpose of narratives vary across cultures (Heath, 1982; Slobin & Berman, 1994), many researchers attempting to avoid cultural and linguistic biases have chosen to study narratives based on wordless picture books (Botting, 2002)
This research operates within the well-established cognitivist paradigm, using traditional quantitative methods to map the course of narrative performance across languages and age ranges

Summary

Introduction

Narratives involve the use of language for communicative purposes. For this reason, many investigators consider narrative ability to be the “gold standard” in research into children’s language development (Miller, Heilmann, & Nockerts, 2006). Structure and purpose of narratives vary across cultures (Heath, 1982; Slobin & Berman, 1994), many researchers attempting to avoid cultural and linguistic biases have chosen to study narratives based on wordless picture books (Botting, 2002). Both within cross-linguistic studies and in the context of assessment, has traditionally focused on norm-referenced measures of structure Many such traditional studies are inspired by the analytical framework for oral presentations of personal experiences proposed by Labov and Waletzky (2006 [1967]), which distinguishes between the referential and the evaluative function of narrative.. It is the basis for most “Frog Story” research (Justice, Bowles, Pence, & Gosse, 2010; Miller et al, 2006; Petersen, Gillam, & Gillam, 2008; Slobin & Berman, 1994; Verhoeven & Strömqvist, 2004). The evaluative function, by contrast, is of greater importance in cross-cultural studies

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