Narratives in family dinner table conversations : a study of the co-narration at dinnertime in twenty Swedish families

In previous research of functions of family dinner talk and conversation, co-narration was found to be an important ingredient. For this reason and because of the importance of family dinners as a context of child socialization, family narration was considered worthy of some extra attention. In this study, narrative activity appearing during dinner table conversations was studied in ten video recorded conversations in ten monolingual Swedish families with children of ages 7-14. The ten recordings were divided into two groups depending on age of the children (group 1: 7-11 years and group 2: 10-14 years) and extensively studied with regard to structural, referential, formal and functional aspects. The results revealed similarities regarding certain basic variables, e.g. mean numbers of narratives utterances of the total amount of utterances, especially between adults. However, there were also some striking differences between the groups, e.g. different amount of narrative reference to past and mediated, i.e. decontextualized, events, of complex and elaborated narrative turns and of narrative initiations and elicitations, not only between younger and older siblings, but also in some respects between the two groups of children of the same age (10-11 years), although the latter group produced fewer utterances. These findings suggest that older siblings, despite taking more space in the conversation, would contribute to a supportive conversational context, thus allowing their younger siblings to perform in a “zone of proximal development”. The results suggest that the model used in this analysis captures interesting cultural and situational similarities and differences in family dinner table conversations as well as differences in children´s narrative behaviour possibly due to age. Certain adult conversational patterns might be a result of specific adaptations to the children´s age-dependent narrative skills and serve as co-narrative support. The study of the two groups with different ages of the participating children ages also suggest that older siblings would be important, both in a competitive and supportive role