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8 - Beyond Chronicity: Evaluation and Temporality in Spanish-Speaking Children's Personal Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Paola Uccelli
Edited by
Allyssa McCabe ,
Alison L. Bailey  and
Gigliana Melzi
Allyssa McCabe
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Alison L. Bailey
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Gigliana Melzi
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

Key Words: narrative, language development, Andean, Spanish-speaking children, temporality, evaluation

ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on Spanish-speaking children's evaluation and temporality in the construction of personal narratives. The study analyzes 32 personal narratives produced by 8 Andean Spanish-speaking children from the Andean city of Cusco in Peru. All children were monolingual speakers of the Andean Spanish variety and came from lower-middle-class families. Half the children were preschoolers (4;9 to 5;5 years) and the other half were first-graders (6;6 to 7;8 years). Both age groups were balanced in terms of gender. Children were interviewed and tape-recorded by the author using the Conversational Map of Narratives of Real Experiences (McCabe & Rollins, 1994) as the elicitation procedure. Narratives were transcribed using CHAT conventions (MacWhinney, 2000) and were subsequently coded for narrative components (Peterson & McCabe, 1983) and temporal organization (Genette, 1980). Results indicated that contrary to the sequentiality and single-story structure reported as characteristic of U.S. European American English-speaking children, these Andean Spanish-speaking children's narratives present a distinctive feature labeled herein as structural evaluation. Structural evaluation takes two forms, either (1) a functional deviation from the timeline of real events; or (2) a chain of independent stories connected within the boundaries of a single narrative. These young narrators used these strategies to evaluate a specific point in the narrative, consequently affecting both the temporal organization of events and the episodic complexity of the narratives.

Type
Chapter
Information
Spanish-Language Narration and Literacy
Culture, Cognition, and Emotion
 , pp. 175 - 212
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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