Story Recipients Research Articles

Engaging through storytelling: the interplay of engagement with a story, cause, and charity

AbstractCharities engage customers with their cause to encourage charity support behaviours (CSB) and often use storytelling to create that impact. We argue that mechanisms underpinning this process manifest in the story recipients’ engagement with a sequence of focal objects—from the story (i.e. through narrative transportation) to the cause it concerns (i.e. customer engagement), to the charity that supports the cause (i.e. CSB). An online survey (n = 585) required participants to alternatively read a story of a person experiencing homelessness or a general text about homelessness. Results show that narrative transportation leads to CSB through different cognitive, affective, and conative customer engagement paths. Using both narrative and non-narrative text, managers can appeal to specific dimensions of customer engagement to elicit high and low involvement CSB.

Κατασκευή αφηγηματικών ταυτοτήτων και υβριστικός λόγος: Η περίπτωση του γλωσσικού στοιχείου μαλάκας

In this article, I explore the role of swearing in conversational narratives. More specifically, I examine how the Greek swearword ‘malakas’, employed either by the narrators or by the story recipients, contributes to narrative identity constructions. Drawing on positioning theory, I argue that via the swearword ‘malakas’, a variety of significant narrative identities are made manifest, such as the outgroup member-story character, the ingroup member-story character, the competent narrator, the affiliative story-recipient etc.

‘Sharing the experience’ in enactments in storytelling

This study explores a particular kind of enactment in storytelling sequences where a story recipient is recruited by the teller as a designated character in the scene being acted out. Using the conversation-analytic methodological approach, we found that the enactment under investigation often occurred where a response (from the recruited recipient or another recipient) to some matters in the on-going telling was treated as misaligned or inapposite. We then show that the recipient may be recruited either implicitly or explicitly by (not) receiving specific instructions from the teller as to who or what to be enacted. We also show that the one being recruited was able to manage, during his/her enacted participation, the dual roles as a recipient of and a character in the story through multimodal resources. We argue that such enactments are one of the distinctive ways in which personal experiences are transformed and shared in mundane everyday life. Data are in Mandarin and Cantonese.

The Recognition and Interactional Management of Face Threats: Comparing Neurotypical Participants and Participants with Asperger's Syndrome

Erving Goffman has argued that the threat of losing one's face is an omnirelevant concern that penetrates all actions in encounters. However, studies have shown that compared with neurotypical individuals, persons diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder can be less preoccupied with how others perceive them and thus possibly less concerned of face in interaction. Drawing on a data set of Finnish quasinatural conversations, we use the means of conversation analysis to compare the practices of facework in storytelling sequences involving neurotypical (NT) participants and participants diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome (AS). We found differences in the ways in which the AS and NT participants in our data managed face threats in interaction, where they spontaneously assumed the roles of both storytellers and story recipients. We discuss our findings in relation to theories of self in interaction, with an aim to illuminate both typical and atypical interactional practices of facework.

The epistemics of narrative performance in conversation

Abstract This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and too much information in narrative. Viewing narrative performance as sharing territories of knowledge provides new insights into the notions of telling rights and tellability as well as teller competence and credibility. The narrative performance may contain gaps and discrepancies along with clusters of copious information from which recipients must pick and choose to construct a dynamic narrative model to be tested against further information. In the communal presentation of family narratives, territories of knowledge merge, shared events are illuminated from separate perspectives, gaps in knowledge are filled, and evaluations are enriched.

Humor and Food Storytelling in Talk-in-Interaction

This study investigates interaction between native Japanese speakers in food-related storytelling, focusing on how participants share their food and culinary experiences in the past and present humorously, deploying linguistic devices, prosody, laughter, and embodied actions. Building on studies of storytelling, food talk in interaction, laughter, and humor, I explore how humorous laughter is used to accomplish three actions in humorous storytelling: to display “surprise,” to “ridicule,” and to express “funniness” (Nakamura, 2002). I show that ridicule laughter was used to recount episodes about the story character’s poor cooking skills or failure to cook or do the dishes, and funny laughter was used in stories about story characters’ eating behaviors that were contradictory, unusual, or inappropriate for the occasion and in stories about unexpected or extraordinary ingredients in food or dishes in a meal. I also demonstrate that story recipients actively contributed to the humor by bringing surprise laughter to the storytelling to upgrade the storyteller’s assessments in funny or surprising stories and by using exaggeration and metaphor in their response comments to transform the characterization of surprise or complaint stories into humorous ones. This study illuminates the interactional process through which participants collaboratively co-construct humorous food storytelling in talk-in-interaction, by elucidating how storytellers and story recipients co-experience incongruity between their predictions and reality, collaboratively (re-)discover humor in the event together, and achieve mutual understanding of the different social actions accomplished by humorous laughter. It reveals that humorous food-related stories are told based on fixed ideas, knowledge, cultures, social norms, and identities that the participants share about food aspects among their group members. It suggests that humor in food talk dynamically changes in the interaction among co-participants in social and interactional contexts and that food humor is continuously modified, as we expand our food experiences and revise our concepts related to food.

Scaffolding storytelling and participation with a bilingual child in a culturally and linguistically diverse preschool in Australia

Children frequently share stories as they play. Oral storytelling brings forth matters to do with language competence, and thus may present challenges for those with varying linguistic ability or those who are have a first language other than the dominant language of the setting. This article reports on a study of children’s playground interaction in a culturally and linguistically diverse preschool in Brisbane, Australia. An extended sequence of interaction is showcased in which one bilingual child (aged four years), speaking in his second language, takes up the role of storyteller in a designated ‘storytelling chair’. Sequential analyses using conversation analysis show how scaffolding is collaboratively achieved through a teacher’s responsiveness and the children’s demonstrated competence as storyteller and story recipients. By focusing on the interactional contributions of the members rather than individuals’ linguistic development, findings offer understandings about the co-productive and interactive communicative resources required for scaffolding storytelling.

Geovisual analysis of VGI for understanding people's behaviour in relation to multifaceted context

Geovisual analysis of VGI for understanding people's behaviour in relation to multifaceted context

Nods, vocal continuers, and the perception of empathy in storytelling

ABSTRACTIn her influential paper on stance, alignment, and affiliation in conversational storytelling, Tanya Stivers argued that two basic conversational means of receiving a story, nods and vocal continuers, differ in their function: whereas vocal continuers display alignment with the telling activity, nods, during the mid-telling, convey affiliation with the storytellers’ affective stance. In this paper, we elaborate these insights on the basis of a quantitative study informed by conversation analysis. Using a database of 317 stories told in Finnish, we analyzed how story recipients’ nods and continuers in different phases of storytelling (before and after the story climax) predict naïve raters’ judgments of the story recipients’ empathy toward the storyteller. We found that vocal continuers accounted for the perception of empathy during mid-telling, whereas the effect of nods remained weak. The study offers further support to the notion of structural organization of storytelling, and suggests that the significance of vocal continuers as a vehicle of empathy may be greater than has been generally thought of.

Mediator as a Story Recipient in Narrative Mediation: What Types of Questions Should I Ask?

<p><em>This study adopted the theoretical framework of narrative mediation to investigate a storied conflict talk between a landlord and her tenant in which the mediator played the role of a story recipient in the co-construction of stories with disputants. The focus of this research is on the function of questions posed by the mediator in the production of turning points which are favourable to the evolution of “better-formed” stories. The results of this study indicate that there are at least two types of questions mediators ask: 1) the questions that can help disputants reflect on their imperfectness; 2) the questions that awaken disputants’ memories of their good stories from the past. It is shown that the de-legitimacy for Self laid a foundation for the production of a good story towards a meaningful outcome for the mediation. The inadequacy of the context formed by first having legitimacy for Other followed by the de-legitimacy for Self led to the failure of destabilizing the problematic story in the mediation. The lack of the dominant party’s legitimacy for Other resulted in the absence of legitimacy from the marginalized side and would likely cause unfavourable consequences to the mediation in the long term.</em></p>

Identity navigation, story evaluation and recipient identification in The Graham Norton Show’s “Red Chair stories”

Abstract For the evaluation of a story, story recipients rely on a narrator’s identity work. Uniquely, these related processes of identity work and story evaluation unfold explicitly in the Red Chair segment of The Graham Norton Show, where “bad” stories are rejected by flipping the narrator out of a red chair, and narrators of “good” stories may walk away from the chair. We collected every Red Chair story broadcast in 2013 and analyzed these by drawing on Bamberg (2011, Narrative practice and identity navigation. In James A. Holstein & Jaber F. Gubrium [eds.], Varieties of narrative analysis, 99–124. London: Sage)’s three main dimensions of identity navigation, namely, agency, sameness/difference, and constancy/change. The analyses reveal diverging tendencies, which we bring together by means of the concept of identification, viz. (i) the story recipient’s affiliation with the protagonist of the story and/or with the narrator, or (ii) the recipient’s vicarious experience of the events. We propose that a story recipient’s evaluation can be related to the extent to which identification is elicited. This identification is not only based on the navigational dimension of sameness/difference, as often proposed, but it is, among others, a result of the narrator’s unique identity navigation along the three closely interwoven dimensions, thus also including agency and constancy/change.

Integrating Corpus-Linguistic and Conversation-Analytic Transcription in XML: The Case of Backchannels and Overlap in Storytelling Interaction

This paper sketches out and illustrates the research opportunities that come with the recent addition to BNCweb of very large numbers of audio files for the spoken component in the BNC. It aims to demonstrate that the availability of the audio files enables researchers not only to correct the orthographic transcripts, but also to re-transcribe the conversations using conversation-analytic transcription. It also shows that the CA transcripts can be integrated into the BNC’s XML annotation network and illustrates how XML query tools such as XPath and XQuery can be used to efficiently exploit the XML network. The main thrust of the paper is to argue that the integration of corpus-linguistic and conversation-analytic transcription in XML can make major contributions both to CL and CA. CL research into conversation can for the first time be performed on the basis of transcription that is “detailed enough to facilitate the analyst’s quest to discover and describe orderly practices of social action in interaction” (Hepburn and Bolden, in: Sidnell, Stivers (eds) The handbook of conversation analysis, Wiley Malden, 2013: 58) while CA research can gain a large-scale quantitative basis to substantiate claims about the generalizability of observed regularities and patterns in talk-in-interaction. To illustrate the benefits of doing research on re-transcriptions of the BNC’s audio files, a case study is presented on backchannels occurring in overlap in storytelling interaction. The case study reveals, inter alia, that backchannels produced by story recipients simultaneously with parts of the storyteller’s ongoing turn tend to increase in frequency as the storytelling reaches its climax. Backchannel overlap is thus in synchrony with story organization. This finding adds weight to Goodwin’s observation that recipients attend to the task “not simply of listening to the events being recounted but rather of distinguishing different subcomponents of the talk in terms of the alternative possibilities for action they invoke” (Goodwin, in: Atkinson, Heritage (eds) Structures of social action: studies in conversation analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984: 243). The case study also presents exploratory evidence to suggest that, arguably due to the extended length of storytelling turns (Ochs and Capps in Living narrative, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001), the proportion of overlap in running speech may be considerably lower in storytelling than in general conversation and telephone conversation.

Development of L2 Interactional Competence: Being a Story Recipient in L2 English Conversation

Development of L2 Interactional Competence: Being a Story Recipient in L2 English Conversation

Achieving competence: The interactional features of children’s storytelling

Early years researchers interested in storytelling have largely focused on the development of children’s language and social skills within constructed story sessions. Less focus has been given to the interactional aspects of storytelling in children’s everyday conversation and how the members themselves, the storytellers and story recipients, manage storytelling. An interactional view, using ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches, offers the opportunity to study children’s narratives in terms of ‘members work’. Detailed examination of a video-recorded interaction among a group of children in a preparatory year playground shows how the children managed interactions within conversational storytelling. Analyses highlight the ways in which children worked at gaining a turn and made a story tellable within a round of second stories. Investigating children’s competence-in-action ‘from within’, the findings from this research show how children invoke and accomplish competence through their interactions.

Affect-Loaded Questions in Japanese Storytelling: An Analysis of Grammar, Prosody, and Body Movements of Story Recipients’ Questions

The present study explores affective stance in conversational storytelling by investigating the ways in which unknowing story recipients display affective stances toward a teller’s story through questions that deploy multimodal resources. The data are based on videotaped natural face-to-face conversations between native Japanese speakers. While unknowing story recipients ask questions of the storyteller only to elicit factual information (“neutral questions”), they also ask questions layered with affect (“affect-loaded questions”). Building on studies on affect and stance, assessment, questions, and alignment and affiliation in storytelling, I demonstrate how unknowing story recipients ask affect-loaded questions to elicit and display affective stances toward story contents by exploiting linguistic and non-linguistic resources. First, I explicate how unknowing story recipients employ not only linguistic devices (e.g., emotion words, wh-questions, and deictic expressions such as sonna “like that”), but also prosody, facial expressions, body movements, and pre-/concurrent-laughter in order to load questions with affective stance that display, for example, disgust, humor, sarcasm, criticism, or surprise. Secondly, I show how unknowing story recipients use rhetorical questions to express their affect (rather than to elicit information from the storyteller). Thirdly, I demonstrate how affiliation of affective stance between storyteller and unknowing story recipients influences the trajectory of storytelling and how the participants negotiate their affective stances. This study sheds light on the interactional process of how participants in talk-in-interaction display affective stance through a range of multimodal resources, by examining how unknowing story recipients ask affect-loaded questions of the storyteller. It illuminates the social practice of story recipients’ active participation in storytelling activity that is embedded in social interaction, through their use of questions that dynamically co-construct and negotiate affective stance.

“You said that?”: Other-initiations of repair addressed to represented talk

AbstractThis paper examines a topic that has not gained much analytic attention in research on represented talk: how recipients respond, and how their responses shape the ongoing interaction. Using conversation analysis, we investigate responses to represented talk in complaint stories told in autobiographical interviews. Supportive recipient actions are the most common, but on occasion the recipient other-initiates repair on the quoted talk. These other-initiations of repair are done as candidate understandings, formatted as positive declarative questions, and regularly locate the specific trouble source in the represented talk through prosodic emphasis. In some instances, they do no more than seeking confirmation of the story recipient’s uncertain understanding, but often, the other-initiations of repair are produced or understood as questioning the acceptability of the represented talk. For the most part tellers reaffirm, defend, and reinforce their claim that the talk happened as previously portrayed. By rejecting the recipient’s challenge, the tellers show that they expect a more empathetic stance from the story recipient. Finally, we consider what the participants may accomplish with the observed practices in the autobiographic interview as an institutional activity.

Analyzing Storytelling In TESOL Interview Research

Autobiographic research interviews have become an accepted and valued method of qualitative inquiry in TESOL and applied linguistics more broadly. In recent discussions surrounding the epistemological treatment of autobiographic stories, TESOL researchers have increasingly called for more attention to the ways in which stories are embedded in interaction and thus are bound up with the social contexts of their production. This paper advances these efforts by demonstrating an empirically grounded approach to storytelling as interaction. Drawing on the research tradition on storytelling in conversation analysis, the article offers a sample analysis of a story produced in an L2 English interview with an adult immigrant in the United States. By engaging sequential conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, and occasioned semantics, it examines the interactional practices through which the storyteller and story recipient launch, produce, and end the telling of a story that furthers the purpose of the autobiographic interview. By following closely the participants' coordinated actions as they unfold in time, we trace how the parties accomplish the storytelling as an intelligible and meaningful activity through sequence organization and turn design. We conclude with recommendations for extending storytelling research in TESOL to meet the evolving needs and interests of the field.

Minimal affect uptake in a pre-climax position of conversational “scary” stories

Analyzing pre-climax positions of everyday affect-laden telling activities, this paper shows that particular facial expressions, such as raised eyebrows with an open mouth or jaw-dropping, are the devices which are preferably deployed by story recipients as a minimal uptake to display affiliation, especially in the case of “scary” stories.During the course of conversational storytelling, it is structurally necessary that recipients warrant the teller's speakership. At the same time, a particular affective display—not only in response to what has been said but also to what comes at the climax—appears to become relevant. Immediately prior to the climax, when the teller employs elaborate multimodal cues, the recipient's display of an “anticipatory affect” is made relevant. A particular type of affect signals the anticipation of what kind of climax is approaching. The present paper explores how story recipients accomplish this two-fold task, namely to display alignment with the speaker's role allocation and listenership on the one hand and affiliation on the other. The study argues that a minimal uptake is called for, requiring only a minimal slot in the flow of storytelling and facial expressions that are most likely to fit this slot.

Affectivity in conversational storytelling

This paper reports on some recent work on affectivity, or emotive involvement, in conversational storytelling. After presenting the approach, some case studies of the display and management of affectivity in storytelling in telephone and face-to-face conversations are presented. The analysis reconstructs the display and handling of affectivity by both storyteller and story recipient. In particular, I describe the following kinds of resources: - the verbal and segmental display: Rhetorical, lexico-semantic, syntactic, phonetic-phonological resources; - the prosodic and suprasegmental vocal display: Resources from the realms of prosody and voice quality; - visual or "multimodal" resources from the realms of body posture and its changes, head movements, gaze, and hand movements and gestures. It is shown that the display of affectivity is organized in orderly ways in sequences of storytelling in conversation. I reconstruct (a) how verbal, vocal and visual cues are deployed in co-occurrence in order to make affectivity in general and specific affects in particular interpretable for the recipient and (b) how in turn the recipient responds and takes up the displayed affect. As a result, affectivity is shown to be managed by teller and recipient in storytelling sequences in conversation, involving both the reporting of affects from the story world as well as the negotiation of in-situ affects in the here-and-now of the storytelling situation.

Closing in on Story Openings and Closings: Evidence from Conversational Stories in Greek

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to show the benefits of incorporating a conversation-analytic perspective in the analysis of Greek storytelling data with regard to the endpoints of a telling, that is, the opening and the closing. I specifically explore the types of story openings and closings occurring in a data set that comprises the conversations of a group of female adolescents in a small town in Greece. I also discuss the salience of economic openings (Jefferson 1978) realized by certain conventionalized devices and the importance and local design of what I call counter stories in the stories' closing. I juxtapose counter stories to second stories (Sacks 1992), which have been found within CA to be frequent after a story's closing and I assess the frequency of second stories told by the same teller and not by a story recipient in my data. Overall, I argue that these systematic openings and closings in my data are interrelated with the types of stories told and the participants' roles and relations. Finally, I ponder the implications of this close connection for CA work on stories as talk-in-interaction.