Retelling of Stories Read and Space of Argument

The purpose of this study is to clarify and discuss how the space of argument is involved in generation of retelling, and, based on the results, to design a literature reading class where students’ skill of retelling can be nurtured, and to verify the validity of the theory. The results indicated the following. First, 1) a variation of the space of argument, i.e. a) narrator and listener, b) context (age, culture, etc.), or c) a relation with other texts, will change the purpose and intention of each narrator and listener; 2) these changes of purpose and intention generate a cognitive gap between a story to be told which the narrator and listener expect and a story which has already been told, and; 3) according to a newly-expected telling, events will be selected, arranged, and edited to generate a retelling. Second, it was indicated that, provision of the space of argument close to the original text enables a reader, based on events obtaining new meanings, to feel a gap against his/her conventional thought patterns and to retell a picture of the world of characters. In addition, this provision will also have an influence on the retelling of a reader’s personal narrative