The Narrativization of Experience in the Oral Style

Abstract

While acknowledging that the distinction between oral and literate styles of communication is not in reality a dichotomy, but a continuum of styles, this paper focuses on the oral style. Many children, often from middle-class mainstream homes, bring to school the foundations of literate styles of speech even before they can write. Other children, often minority children, do not. This paper gives a detailed linguistic-stylistic analysis of a seven year old black child's “sharing time” narrative, a narrative that is clearly in the oral style. “Sharing time” (sometimes called “show and tell”) is a school exercise that is meant to develop literate style communication, though it in fact assumes for success that child already shares aspects of this style with the teacher. Thus, oral style children often appear incoherent to the teacher and end up being given less (and less quality) instructional time and attention than literate style children. The stylistic analysis given here seeks to explicate how the child makes sense of her experience through narrative (the primary role of narrative in human life). I take the position that narrativizing experience is a basic human trait and that, like language, it is not something that children should in any significant sense be better or worse at. Rather, barring the attenuation of this ability by cultural practices or by the school itself, all children make sense of their experiences and do so in a masterful way. Of course, cross-cultural differences also exist, some of them perhaps related to patterns and types of literacy. In fact, the narrative of the young girl studied here shares many features with narratives found throughout the world in oral cultures. I also briefly discuss the role of cultural stereotypes both in the construction of narratives and in the view schools take of communication (linguistics, anthropology, education, stylistics, narrative, and discourse).