Narrative Production Research Articles

Using Wordless Picturebooks to Promote Bilingual Students’ Translanguaging Practices

ABSTRACT Using the transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1995, 2001) and translanguaging pedagogy (García, 2009) as guiding lenses, this study explores how 1st-grade Korean-English bilingual students engage in storytelling and meaning construction using two languages when they encounter one of the chosen wordless picturebooks. The findings indicate that although visualizing is the main strategy to create the plot from the wordless picturebook, the students incorporate other reading comprehension strategies (i.e. using prior knowledge, making connections, predicting, revising and verifying their predictions, and inferencing) to construct the meaning of the story. Since storylines are delivered through illustrations only in wordless picturebooks, the bilingual students flexibly translanguage by deploying their linguistic resources from both languages during their story creation. The findings imply that using wordless picturebooks can be an influential pedagogical instrument to help bilingual students employ a broader language repertoire in their oral narrative production so that their responses from different perspectives and experiences are valued during literary activities in the classroom.

Invasion, Replacement and Colonial Anxiety in The War of the Worlds

British novelist Herbert George Wells’ 1897 science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds is a story about an invasion of the planet Earth by extraterrestrial beings. The novel is Wells’ reaction to his firsthand witnessing of the horrors of British colonialism. Seeing what travesties humans were capable of inflicting on other humans, the story is a projection of colonial anxiety. On 30 October 1938, American theatre director and filmmaker Orson Welles, along with adapter Howard Koch and the actors of the Mercury Theatre, performed H. G. Wells’ nineteenth-century science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds as a radio play. Infamous in its reception, the 1938 broadcast was an early example of so-called ‘fake news’. On 9–13 March 2022 the University of Missouri Department of Theatre (USA) staged a theatrical version of The War of the Worlds, using the script from the 1938 radio play. I had the privilege of directing the show alongside a culturally diverse production team and cast. The concept behind the MU production was to utilize decolonial strategies of production in order to cut through ‘fakeness’, and explicate connections between the story and colonial anxieties. We attempted to expose the means of the production of the false narrative through the utilization of anti-racist and anti-sexist directing strategies, and Brechtian theatrical techniques. This essay is an exploration of how our production elucidated the themes of invasion and replacement in the original novel, the radio broadcast and the contemporary version. This analysis reveals the multitude ways in which fantasies of an alien invasion is rooted in the same colonial anxieties that are driving a widespread state of cultural unrest today, and suggests some strategies for making theatre that attempts to ease some of these anxieties. Directors who produce theatre must constantly read ‘against the grain’ of colonial anxieties.

‘If you don’t “pass” as cis, you don’t exist’. The trans audience's reproofs of ‘Cis Gaze’ and transnormativity in TV series

There are currently more trans characters than ever in television series, while at the same time scrutiny of trans people is intensifying in social and public debate, and the correspondence between this increased presence in the media and improvements in the trans community's rights is in dispute. This research aims to find out how trans audiences relate to their portrayal in TV series, to learn about their perceptions and opinions, and to understand how these depictions affect their everyday lives. A qualitative analysis was conducted of 19 trans people in two focus groups and nine semi-structured interviews. The findings show that the participants perceive a clear distance between their realities and the most popular narratives about trans lives. They identify cispassing as a transversal element that drives the production, creation, and distribution of media narratives, leading to a transnormative representation. Consequently, the trans audience demands the inclusion of trans people in the (audiovisual) cultural circuit in order to combat the ‘cis gaze’ and to create more diverse narratives.

Rethinking the dialogical dimension of narrative productions beyond co-construction: unveiling the role of disagreement, contradictions, and dispute

ABSTRACT Narrative productions methodology (NPM) constitutes a social research technique that, within feminist epistemologies and, in particular, Haraway’s situated knowledge, seeks to produce partial knowledge from co-writing practices of research texts between researcher and participant. The question that emerges is the extent to which NPM goes beyond co-construction to involve a deeper sense of dialogism, in which alterity is not dissolved but remains as a tensioned difference. The aim of this paper is to explore how dialogizing NPM can improve narratives as a feminist research tool. This has political and epistemological implications, as in the construction of knowledge some validation mechanisms dominated by specific groups have been privileged. As a consequence, not all knowledge has the same recognition, and feminist epistemologies argue against this over-representation. The political and epistemological implications of these suggestions are discussed.

Executive Function and Narrative Language Abilities in Emergent Bilingual Preschoolers: An Exploratory Study.

In light of the importance of preschool oral narrative skills as precursors to literacy, this exploratory study examined expressive language skills among emergent bilingual Latine preschoolers using a naturalistic personal narrative task. To understand the factors that support language use in the personal narrative context for this population, we examined the contribution of children's executive function (EF) skills to their narrative language abilities. Children completed two subtests from the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment to measure EF and produced two personal narratives in response to conversational prompts. A series of linear regressions were used to evaluate the relation between children's EF skills and their narrative production ability, narrative organization, and expressive language skills derived from automated analyses of narrative samples. EF was found to predict children's ability to produce a personal narrative but not the language skills children demonstrated in these narratives. The current findings suggest that EF is implicated in emergent bilingual Latine children's narrative abilities. At the preschool age, the contribution of EF to narrative language production is apparent in the global task of producing a narrative, rather than in the organizational or linguistic features of the narrative. As such, supporting both EF and narrative skills might be an important means of facilitating preliteracy among bilingual children.

The methodological and epistemic narrative of narrative productions

ABSTRACT The empiricism underlying the research techniques developed in the context of the discursive turn of the late 1980s opened up various polemics during the 1990s on the practice of critical research. This effervescence led in the 2000s to the development and consolidation of Narrative Production Methodology as a qualitative research technique in the Catalan academic and activist context. Its grounding in feminist epistemology and dialogism provides a set of methodological principles for articulating and transforming partial positions of knowledge in the production of what Haraway considers ‘objective knowledge.’ The article provides the academic and epistemological context for the emergence of the Narrative Production Methodology and outlines the main technical procedures involved in the technique. Finally, the text reflects on the ontological implications of the narrative perspective.

Multimodal Development in Children's Narrative Speech: Evidence for Tight Gesture-Speech Temporal Alignment Patterns as Early as 5 Years Old.

This study aims to analyze the development of gesture-speech temporal alignment patterns in children's narrative speech from a longitudinal perspective and, specifically, the potential differences between different gesture types, namely, gestures that imagistically portray or refer to semantic content in speech (i.e., referential gestures) and those that lack semantic content (i.e., non-referential gestures). This study uses an audiovisual corpus of narrative productions (n = 332) from 83 children (43 girls, 40 boys) who participated in a narrative retelling task at two time points in development (at 5-6 and 7-9 years of age). The 332 narratives were coded for both manual co-speech gesture types and prosody. Gestural annotations included gesture phasing (i.e., preparation, stroke, hold, and recovery) and gesture types (in terms of referentiality, i.e., referential and non-referential), whereas prosodic annotations included pitch-accented syllables. Results revealed that by ages 5-6 years, children already temporally aligned the stroke of both referential and non-referential gestures with pitch-accented syllables, showing no significant differences between these two gesture types. The results of the present study contribute to the view that both referential and non-referential gestures are aligned with pitch accentuation, and therefore, this is not only a characteristic of non-referential gestures. Our results also add support to McNeill's phonological synchronization rule from a developmental perspective and indirectly back up recent theories about the biomechanics of gesture-speech alignment, suggesting that this is an inherent ability of oral communication.

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

Text complexity and variety factors in narrative retelling and narrative comprehension among Arabic-speaking preschool children

The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their effect on narrative retelling and comprehension. Four narratives accompanied by six pictures each (Gagarina et al., 2012) were used. Two were presented in MSA and two in PA, the children’s spoken vernacular. Two of them, one per each language variety, matched on episodic structure, were less complex, and two were more complex. Although children were free to choose which language to use for the retelling, they all used PA. Retelling performance was analyzed according to macrostructure, microstructure, and the use of Internal State Terms (ISTs). Comprehension was tested via questions addressing the character’s goals, ISTs, and Theory of Mind. With respect to text complexity, the results showed that the participants produced longer texts and demonstrated better comprehension when the narratives were more complex. Language variety was only associated with a difference in comprehension, with higher scores for the narratives presented in MSA. Older children produced longer texts and a higher number of ISTs. Finally, a three-way interaction emerged in the use of ISTs – while younger children produced more ISTs for the PA narratives, the older ones produced more of those for the MSA narratives. The study suggests that language variety and text complexity may exert different effects on narrative production and comprehension in Arabic-speaking preschool children.

Resistance to Denmark’s Ad Hoc Campaign Against Asylum Seekers

ABSTRACT This paper examines actions taken in response to the Danish government’s use of policies and public communications to try to asylum seekers crossing its border. Drawing on interviews with grassroots civil society organizations and refugees as well as assessment of refugee-oriented public projects, this analysis finds that civil society and refugees engaged in a range of actions to resist national policies. Such actions included the production of alternative narratives about borders, prioritizing humanitarian practices, and highlighting asylum seekers’ lived experiences as important forms of border and migration knowledge and expertise.

Left-behind experience and language proficiency predict narrative abilities in the home language of Kam-speaking minority children in China.

Studies have documented that child experiences such as external/environmental factors as well as internal factors jointly affect acquisition outcomes in child language. Thus far, the findings have been heavily skewed toward Indo-European languages and children in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. By contrast, this study features an understudied minority language Kam, and a group of so-called left-behind children in China growing up in a unique social-communicative environment. Fifty-five bilingual children aged 5-9 acquiring Kam as home language were assessed using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS MAIN). Twenty-three "two parents-left" children (mean age = 6;8, range: 5;0-9;2) remained in rural areas while both parents went to cities for employment, and they were raised by their grandparents. Thirty-two were "one parent-left" peers (mean age = 7;3, range: 5;0-9;3) who also resided in rural areas but were raised by one parent. Oral narrative texts were analysed for macrostructure based on story structure (SS), story complexity (SC) and internal state terms (IS). The study examined whether and how narrative production is predicted by internal factors such as chronological age and linguistic proficiency of a child and an external factor such as left-behind experience. Four measures were scored as outcome measures: SS, SC, IS type, IS token. Four measures were taken as predictors: chronological age, left-behind experience, scores in a lexical production task, and scores in a sentence repetition task tapping expressive morphosyntactic competence. Results showed that left-behind experience consistently predicted all four outcome measures, where the "two parents-left" children scored significantly lower than their "one parent-left" peers. Expressive vocabulary scores predicted three measures: SS, SC, and IS Token. Expressive morphosyntactic scores predicted SS and SC. Age, by contrast, did not predict any outcome measure. These findings suggested that being left-behind by both parents may be a negative prognostic indicator for the development and maintenance of heritage language abilities in ethnic minority children. We further discussed the conceptual significance of what it means for a child to be left-behind, by relating to more basic external factors in language development, including caregiver educational level, and amount of home language and literacy support by the caretakers.

Effects of protagonist elaboration on the narrative production

Effects of protagonist elaboration on the narrative production

Symbolic Time(s) of Violence in Late Socialist Bulgaria

By introducing Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, the author explores the state uses of the cinematic industry—notably through the making of grandiose national epics—in the endeavor to model and, ultimately, to assimilate Muslim minorities during the so-called “Revival Process” (1984–1989) in socialist Bulgaria. Drawing attention to often-neglected aspects of film production, such as the selection of symbolically charged “national landscapes,” shooting locations, and the use of Muslim film extras, she examines the production of a state-sponsored historical master narrative, its widespread dissemination at home and abroad, and the attempt at channeling film reception by national minorities and the majority population. The visual recreation of the alleged Ottoman “forced islamization” of Christians and the blurring of the distinction between fiction and fact, as well as past and present were intended to boost the national pride of the majority, achieve support for anti-minority measures, and win the obedience of minorities.

디지털 내러티브의 생산과 전유 - 리얼리티 쇼 ‘요즘 육아 금쪽같은 내새끼’를 중심으로

본고 텔레비전 리얼리티 쇼 ‘요즘 육아 금쪽같은 내새끼’를 대상으로, 리얼리티 쇼가 수용되면서 어떤 서사가 발생하는지 살펴보고, 이것이 다른 매체에서 변형, 재생산되는 과정을 살펴보았다. 그 결과 많은 사용자들이 치료의 서사를 생산하고 전유하는 과정에서 치유 가능성에 더 쉽게 접근할 수 있게 된 반면, 개인의 사적인 공간을 노출하고, 무대화하고, 평범한 사람들의 고통을 분석하고, 유형화하고, 공론화하는 스펙터클 문화의 확장도 불러왔다. 먼저 텔레비전 쇼는 일련의 시퀀스의 연쇄(금쪽이의 문제 행동 노출 → 문제 원인탐색 → 아이 속마음의 노출과 전문가의 진단 → 전문가의 처방과 보호자의 변화 → 문제 해결)에 의해 한 편의 치료의 서사가 만들어진다. 전문가는 금쪽이와 부모의 현재와 과거를 해석, 명명, 진단한다. 이러한 전문가의 담론은 과학적인 동시에 신화적이며, 치료의 서사화에서 핵심적 기제로 작동한다. 시청자들은 텔레비전 쇼를 수동적으로 시청하는 데 그치지 않고, 시청 후기를 올리고, 공유하고, 그 결과물에 다시 반응하면서 새로운 디지털 서사들을 만들어낸다. 이렇게 만들어지는 디지털 서사는 본래의 맥락과 연행 집단에서 분리되면서 새로운 의미작용이 일어난다. 텔레비전 리얼리티 쇼에 나타났던 훔쳐봄의 구조는 소셜 네트워크에서는 노골적인 공시(公示)로 재매개화되고, 완전히 탈맥락화된다. 그 결과 ‘오은영’이라는 고유한 이름, 이미지, 그의 담화는 성인 ‘금쪽이’를 위한 부적이자, 주문, 놀잇감으로 디지털 공간에서 끝없이 복제, 변형, 생성된다.

Speech Rhythm in English and Italian: an Experimental Study on Early Sequential Bilingualism

The study investigates the dynamics of speech rhythm in early sequential bilingual children who have access to Italian-English immersion programs. The research focused on the Italian and English semi-spontaneous narrative productions of 9 students, aged between 6;7 and 10;11 and distributed across three different classes (Year 1, Year 3, Year 5). Their speech was recorded and subject to an interval-based analysis via computation of %V/ΔC, PVI and Varco metrics. The retrieved metrics underwent within-group and between-group one-way ANOVAs in order to identify valuable cross-linguistic variations among children of the same age and statistically significant differences between different age groups (Y1, Y3, Y5). The results appear to support a stress-centered interpretation of speech rhythm: according to this view, all languages could be arranged on a stress-timed continuum in which “syllable-timing” is marked by sparser occurrences of (regular) prominence due to the relative absence of vocalic elision and consonantal complexity. Indeed, the comparative analysis drawn between the normalized vocalic indexes of Y1, Y3 and Y5 students revealed a statistically relevant increase in vocalic variation phenomena both in Italian and in English. Moreover, Y1 and Y3 consonantal scores were comparatively higher in the Italian sample: it will be discussed how unpredictable stress-timed patterns can arise as a function of proficiency, speech-rate and age-related disfluencies.

Storytelling as Media Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue in Post-Colonial Societies

<div><span>This article reflects upon digital storytelling and collaborative media practices as valuable tools for reassessing memory, questioning identity discourses, and unveiling the cultural diversity of contemporary societies. The digital age allows for a constant re-reading and re-mediation of cultural archives by ordinary citizens, namely by younger generations, and for the production and dissemination of alternative narratives about the present. These are crucial opportunities for post-colonial societies to overcome silences around difficult memories that hinder a collective reappropriation of the past, confront some of the current issues on ethnical diversity, and discrimination and reimagine a more inclusive identity. However, taking advantage of this opportunity implies fully recognizing the role of media technology in shaping memory, social individuation and establishing networks, making media literacy and media education crucial aspects of cultural dialogue. Based on the experience of a citizenship project about the post-colonial condition and Afro-European interculturality, this essay reflects on digital storytelling, and co-creative practices as relevant literacy and education strategies for furthering interculturality in contemporary societies.</span></div>

Here’s the story: Narrative ability and executive function in autism spectrum disorder

BackgroundDifficulties with narrative have been reported in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the role of executive function on narrative ability has not been examined in ASD. In this study, we aimed to (1) examine whether narrative abilities of ASD children differed from neurotypical (NT) children who did not differ in age, sex, and IQ; and (2) investigate relations between executive function and narrative ability in ASD children. MethodNarratives were elicited from 64 ASD children and 26 NT children using a wordless picture book and coded to derive several aspects of narrative ability such as propositions, evaluative devices, and self-repairs. Executive functions (specifically, inhibition and working memory) were measured using both experimenter-administered assessment and parent-report measures. ResultsCompared to NT children, ASD children produced fewer propositions but did not differ in their use of evaluative devices and self-repairs during narrative production. Greater inhibitory challenges related to more self-repairs involving repetition of story elements, whereas working memory did not relate to any of the measures of narrative ability among ASD children. ConclusionsThis study revealed that narratives by verbally fluent ASD children were shorter and less complex than those by NT children but did not differ in the specific features of narratives. Furthermore, although ASD children did not make more self-repairs than NT children, difficulty with inhibition was related to more self-repairs, indicating more dysfluent narrative production in ASD children, which has implications for intervention.

Mining Manchuria's Colonial Past

AbstractThe rise of nationalism in China in recent decades has grown in part out of a state-sponsored patriotic education project centered on the production of narratives involving the century-long history of China's subjection to foreign imperialism. In the northeast, the regional history of Russian and Japanese colonialism during the first half of the twentieth century has provided abundant materials for this collective commemoration of China's anti-imperialist struggles. A network of commemorative projects undertaken at local, regional, and national levels of the PRC state since the 1980s, including oral histories, monuments, museums, gazetteers, and party histories, has reframed the history of the northeast borderland in terms that legitimize post-Mao nationalist and market reform ideology. This study brings attention to another dimension of these commemorative projects, the translation and republication of Chinese and Japanese historical accounts originally produced in northern Manchuria during the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the diverse representations of the borderland's history that are included in these accounts, while originally embedded in the colonial institutional contexts of Manchuria, acquired new significance in post-Mao reimaginings of the region's place in defining nationalism and negotiating Sino-Russian relations.

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Sings Which Story?: Narrative Production and Race in the Curriculum of Film Musicals

Film musicals serve as a tool to infuse historical and cultural content into social studies curricula towards greater student engagement—for example, Lin Manuel-Miranda's Hamilton has become a celebrated classroom piece due to its ability to blend history with hip-hop and pop culture. Yet beyond language and content scans, teachers rarely examine or utilize musicals for how their narratives (mis)represent racial communities. This critical film analysis of three film musicals, using the theoretical framework of history production, reveals themes of historical morality, romantic relationship and race, and implicit/explicit racial messaging. Although troubling in their overall contribution to racial projects, film musicals can in fact be an opportune way to engage in the complexities of teaching race and racism in educational spaces when treated as critical curriculums.

From Theory to Data and Back Again: Authors’ Intentions, Characters’ Agency, and the Phenomenology of Writing Narrative

ABSTRACT In recent years, cognitive narratology has drawn on insights from cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind in order to revise the debate around authorial intention. These theoretical approaches often necessarily take into account the phenomenology of narrative creation, yet for the most part, this phenomenology is either derived from a selective sample of anecdotal accounts or else is essentially taken for granted. This article attempts to redress this balance somewhat by attempting an integration of the theoretical and the empirical, and evaluating the theoretical claims made by narratologists in the light of recent phenomenological data on writers’ experiences of their characters (Foxwell et al. 2020). This article suggests that incorporating empirical data in this fashion potentially allows for challenging and refining some previous theories, while also highlighting areas that have been somewhat neglected: most significantly, the role of inner speech in narrative production. Moreover, this article argues that recognizing how inner speech affects both agency and social cognition allows for the reincorporation of valuable insights from “strong” anti-intentionalism while still allowing for the more moderate position advanced within cognitive narratology.