Discourse rules and the oral narrative production of selected middle school students: An ethnographic study with pedagogical implications

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the oral narrative production of students in the course of their normal school day in a northeastern middle school. Oral narrative is defined as spoken language that takes place in a social interaction in which one intent of the speaker is to interpret or make sense of the present by telling about past events. Reviews of the literature provide the rationale for not only studying student oral narrative but also valuing it. Qualitative analysis and an ethnographic approach to collecting data form the methodology of the dissertation. I was a participant observer on a seventh-grade team of sixty students and four teachers. I recorded their talk and my observations in settings which included homeroom, study periods, core classes, interviews, small group discussions, and field trips. Through a process of rereading, coding, charting, and condensing the data, I was able to describe episode-specific and underlying discourse rules which were most often operative just prior to the emergence of student narrative. I found that student oral narrative was most likely to occur just after the discourse rule context made clear that language could be recorded for further study. Students were more likely to narrate just after they were supported in their using language for a variety of purposes including to answer questions and to express emotions. When students could initiate the topic of talk, speak spontaneously, and talk with small groups of peers, oral narrative was also more likely to occur. Pedagogical implications include the need for educational leaders to design in-service education that familiarizes current practitioners with a research base for decision making in the area of developing students as oral communicators and thereby as narrators. One of many recommendations for further research is that k-12 language arts curricular be examined in terms of how they address students as speakers/narrators