Storytelling Engagement Research Articles

The cross-lingual shaping of narrative landscapes: involvement in interpreted story telling

ABSTRACT Although consecutive interpreting of longer stretches of speech inevitably involves repetition and delays, it can also be regarded as a resource for engagement in storytelling. In an open, interpreted conversation on stage about a recently published piece of literature, the participants had to manage several tasks at once: an interview with questions of public interest, a literary reading session with captivating excerpts of adequate length, and the handling of alternating languages on the floor, all within a certain time frame. In the case explored, conversational interactions on different levels, such as repetition, gesture and gaze are analysed, to see both how cross-lingual narration is achieved and what the specific nature of an interpreter-mediated public literary conversation requires from the author, the moderator and the interpreter performing on stage. The study also touches on the role and function of the book as a talking object in the conversation.

Translanguaging through story: Empowering children to use their full language repertoire

Translanguaging through story documents the progression of an emerging bilingual preschooler who draws on his full linguistic repertoire to story his experiences with others. Over the course of the school year, Diego progresses in his ability to tell a complete story in both English and Spanish. Repeated engagement in storytelling provides the support needed for Diego to continue and extend ideas in his stories and in his drawing and play. The case shows how opening the space for children to use their full language repertoire enables a child to reciprocally develop named languages like English and Spanish as he improves at academic tasks like telling stories.

Perceptions of Joint Family Storytelling as Mediators of Family Communication Patterns and Family Strengths

Using family communication patterns theory, this study tested the degree to which perceptions of joint family storytelling mediate the relationship between family communication patterns (i.e., conversation and conformity orientations) and family strengths. Participants included 267 young adults from first-marriage families. Results indicated that conversation orientation is positively associated with the interactional sense-making (ISM) behaviors that characterize jointly told family stories (i.e., engagement, polite turn-taking, perspective-taking and coherence) and family strengths, while conformity orientation is negatively associated with ISM behaviors and family strengths. Indirect effects emerged for conversation and conformity orientations on family strengths through perceptions of ISM behaviors. Specifically, perceptions of storytelling engagement and polite turn-taking mediated the positive association between conversation orientation and family strength, while engagement, perspective-taking, and polite turn-taking mediated the inverse association between conformity orientation and family strength.

The Atlas and the Film

In this article I refer to my fieldwork in Boston's North End to explore the implications of using film and media annotating software as two complementary conceptual tools and representational strategies. I elaborate on Warburg's notion of the "atlas" as an analytic device. I propose the Atlas on the one hand and Montage on the other as two complementary formal principles that allow us to take full advantage of the dialectic nature of the sources we encounter in visual ethnography, as well as of our own capacity for visual engagement: on the one hand a potentially infinite analytics, on the other our own storytelling engagement through film-making.