Capturing the interactional properties of early storytelling: An exploratory study (Contribution to Storytelling in adult-child and children’s peer interactions, organized by Burdelski Matthew [et al.])

This study is an exploratory study of two interactions between a parent and her child aged 23 months. The interactions provide examples of tellings that begin to emerge when the child moves from talk that is highly dependent on the objects or activities in the physical space to talk about events that have occurred in a recent past and are not part of the immediate context. Such talk involves extended, multi-unit sequences. In the child language literature these interactions are reported to emerge from the age of two, typically at the age of 2;6(Miller & Sperry, 1988). Using the micro-analytic methods of conversation analysis where the focus is on interaction as the outcome of the joint, collaborative actions of both parent and child, and how they make visible to each other how they have understood the action in the previous turn, the analysis will focus on two stories.One is initiated by the parent and invites the child to tell the researcher what she had for lunch. The other is a‘second story’ that is triggered by a picture-book story that has just been read. The data were collected in Australia, and the two samples to be analysed are extracted from two 30 minute sessions of a larger sample of 50 hours. Analysis will use a set of features extrapolated from the research on adult story-telling to determine in what ways these two interactional tellings might be construed as stories. They include what triggers the telling,how speakers resolve the interactional problem of creating a multi-unit turn, how the telling is conducted collaboratively, what its purpose is and who it is for, and how it is oriented to as being newsworthy.