What's in a Narrative? Variation in Storytelling at the Interface Between Language and Literacy

Narrative elicitation is an ecological way to investigate linguistic structures and the processes of their acquisition. Variation in narrative production is motivated by different factors, including the type of task, cross-linguistic differences, learners' literacy and cognitive development and the narrative practices in the society.

Research on narrative production plays a central role in linguistics, psycholinguistics and language acquisition. Narrative elicitation allows researchers to investigate specific linguistic structures and the processes involved in their acquisition in an ecological way. This book provides methodological remarks on how to approach research on narratives, identifying factors that underlie variation in narrative production, including the type of narrative task, cross-linguistic differences, learners' literacy and cognitive development and the narrative practices in society. The volume features contributions on theoretical and methodological aspects of research on narratives from 16 researchers in linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and developmental psychology.

Autorentext

Christiane Bongartz is a professor of English linguistics at the University of Cologne. Her research covers a range of theoretical and applied issues in language acquisition in various contexts (L1, 2L1 and L2), with particular reference to the interaction between language internal factors and acquisitional context(s). Jacopo Torregrossa is a professor of multilingualism and second language acquisition at the Romance Department of the Goethe University of Frankfurt. His research interests focus on the interaction between linguistic, metalinguistic and cognitive abilities among bilingual children.

Inhalt

Learner corpora Written and spoken narratives First and second language acquisition Narrative elicitation tasks Children's narratives in Papua New Guinea Reference Clausal types and syntactic complexity Aspectual choices Attention abilities Autism Specific Language Impairment