Marina Lambrou

Collaborative oral narratives of general experience: when an interview becomes a conversation

This article explores the shift in speech genre from a peer group interview speech event to an activity type with interactive features resembling a casual conversation and the consequent effects on the narrator, interviewees and process of story-telling. It reports on sociolinguistic interviews in which collection of oral narratives of personal experience among members of the Greek Cypriot community in London becomes collaborative and facilitates the co-production of spoken personal narratives (hence the ‘general experience’ of the title). The highly social act of narrating sees the emergence of explicit and implicit collaborative strategies, specifically the use of prompts and requests for clarification, which appear to be an inevitable outcome of narrating in a setting where the audience is wider than just the interviewer.

Pedagogical stylistics in an ELT teacher training setting: a case study

Stylistics as an academic discipline tends to be associated with undergraduate programmes in English or English Language studies, where the focus of stylistics is to present students with a range of literary texts for analysis of the language used in order for them to understand how meaning and effects are created. Traditionally, the literary texts under analysis and discussion include novels, poems and plays, which are generally from within the literary canon but can also include modern works. Recent trends in stylistics look to a broader range of texts beyond the literary kind, such as media texts (including advertisements, print and online news, and new/social media); personal or non-literary narratives; political discourse and rhetoric; cartoons and anime and also film and subtitling. Simpson (2004: 5) presents a list of what he describes as basic ‘levels and units of analysis in language’ or ‘levels of language’, which can act as a checklist for the analysis and interpretation of a text, depending on what the focus might be (see Table 19.1).

Narrative, text and time: telling the same story twice in the oral narrative reporting of 7/7

The question of whether it is possible to ‘tell the same story twice’ has been explored in work on conversational narratives, which has set out to understand the existence of some kind of ‘underlying semantic structure’ and ‘script’ (Polanyi, 1981). In conversational narratives, ‘local occasioning’ and ‘recipient design’ (Sacks et al., 1974) are factors that determine the form and function of the story. Here, ongoing talk frames the narrative while other participants provide a ready made audience, all of which, form part of the storytelling process. What happens, however, when a survivor of 7/7 (the date in 2005 of the co-ordinated terrorist bomb attacks on the London transport system in the morning rush hour, which killed 52 and injured hundreds of people), whose personal narrative was reported globally on the day of the event, is again interviewed two and a half years later for their experience of that morning? Is the ‘same story’ retold? Specifically, how far does the latest story replicate the experience and events of the first and which of the prototypical features of a personal narrative – at the level of both the macrostructure and microstructure – remain constant? By comparing both interviews and using Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) narrative framework as the central model for analysis, it is possible to see whether events within the complicating action or features of evaluation remain the most memorable, that is, they are recalled in the second telling as important aspects of the experience, and may be seen to be core narrative categories. While findings show that both narratives are comparable in form, a closer investigation finds compelling differences as well as unexpected linguistic choices. Not only has the second narrative become informed by other, external narratives to become part of a broader, mediated narrative but various discourse strategies of ‘dissociation’ in both interviews have resulted in a retelling of a traumatic experience that appears to have features of an eye witness report rather than a personal narrative. Moreover, this blurring of two distinct genres of storytelling provides a true insight of how the narrator positions himself inside this terrible experience.