NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF ORAL PERSONAL EXPERIENCE ACROSS TWO LANGUAGES AND CULTURES: BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE AND AMERICAN ENGLISH

Stories play a significant role in human culture, and storytelling is ―both universal and timeless ‖ (Wajnryb, 2003, p. 1). The importance of narratives in our everyday lives does not lie in its interactional function only, but in its ability to foster knowledge, memory, and organization of discourse (Bruner, 1991). Accordingly, this discourse mode has been one of the major themes in a variety of fields such as history, anthropology, psychology, literary studies, sociology, education, and, more recently, linguistics and cognitive science (Bloome, 2003; Johnstone, 2001). However, cross-cultural differences in storytelling are a factual possibility, and a word of caution is needed when generalizing the framework of narratives (Polanyi, 1985). Nevertheless, the majority of the works on narratives have taken a monocultural and monolingual approach, predominantly regarding American narratives, and how storytelling is conveyed in other cultures and languages remains to be uncovered. In addition, the field of storytelling has generally been neglected in second language instruction. Telling and listening to stories, nonetheless, are among the very first tasks a language learner faces. It is not surprising then that many native and non-native speakers struggl