6.2.2 Evaluating Experience in Personal Recounts
The personal recount is a narrative variation to construe individuals’ experiences in the phenomenal world through evaluative meanings.What individuals write in their personal recounts saliently reveals what they see as of importance, for example, their learning beliefs and implication about their disciplinary learning values.Individuals use language as a mode to transform personal experience into meaning, to interact in social groups and make meaning of their personal experiences (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999).This social and individual nature of experience determines the understanding of its constitution and can contribute to exploring the individuals’ identity construction in discourse, as it interfaces language use with the enactment of social processes in the world.Following the SFL perspective, the notion of experience in this research is treated as performative and negotiable meaning resources for understanding, representing and acting the potential in reality (cf.Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999).
Narrative is a widely accepted approach to interpreting and evaluating experience.Labov (1972) defines narrative as ‘one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of event which (it is inferred) actually occurred’ (pp.359-360).He claims that narrative is the most effective technique to relive personal experiences in a way that a narrator feels much freer to rehearse important parts of his or her biographical experiences and emotions.Practically, Martin and Rose (2009) consider it as a genre in storytelling discourse that records and unfolds a sequence of events regarding specific rather than generic facts.By following their perspectives on the functions of narrative, the current study collected personal recounts in order to know and understand how far the six Chinese student participants’ possible disciplinary selves were construed in disciplinary events with the different order of nearness or distance in the community.As mentioned in Chapter 2, self is able to be identified and reflected from a person’s social practice, because it can be represented by a personalised process of meaning-making in temporal-spatial interaction.
There is a large quantity of works on the theory and analysis of narratives in research fields such as linguistics, religion and philosophy.Within the discipline of linguistics, Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) six-schemed narrative structure is one of the most influential.In Conversation Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics, researchers (e.g., Bamberg, 1997; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012; Mandelbaum, 2012; Sacks, 1992; Schiffrin, 1996) have used narrative as a good source of natural data to investigate how its forms and functions are meaningfully embedded in the real interactional context.Other linguistic researchers like Chafe (1980), Hymes (1981) or Scollon and Scollon (1981) have explored narrative variation across cultures and languages.At the same time, the application of narrative analysis has been extended in sociology, psychology and related disciplines:for example, Bruner’s (1986, 1997) investigations of the relationship between the role of stories and cultural identities.In SFL, Martin (1981) initially applies and expands Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) narrative analysis model to examine the correlations among story variations, as well as their social status and linguistic realisation.Alongside the extension and expansion of narrative structure analysis, however, Labov and Waletzky’s traditional narrative structure has been challenged as well.
Labov and Waletzky (1967) propose that a narrative of personal experiences can be unfolded through six stages of Abstract, Orientation, Complicating action, Evaluation, Resolution and Coda in line with specific functions as follows:
Abstract:summarise the whole story
Orientation:identify who, when, what, where involved
Complicating action:provide what events happened
Evaluation:indicate how the events were judged
Resolution:recapitulate what finally happened
Coda:signal how the narrative was finished
They introduce Complicating action as the central stage in the model, and clearly state that even if a minimal meaningful narrative is composed of ‘a sequence of two clauses which are temperately ordered’ (Labov, 1972, p.360), it still needs to answer the question of ‘what happened?’.Later on, Labov and Waletzky (1997) find that the Evaluation stage is a key component in the narrative structure, which is a ‘part of the narrative that reveals the attitude of the narrator towards the narrative by emphasising the relative importance of some narrative units’ (p.32).
Despite Labov and Waletzky’s model as a useful starting point to identify the narrative structure, some relevant studies show the need to problematise their approach and argue that not all stories of personal experiences are narratives (cf.Bruner, 1997; Lambrou, 2007; Martin & Rose, 2009; Plum, 1988/1998; Toolan, 2001).For example, Martin and Rose (2009) point out three shortcomings of Labov and Waletzky’s narrative structure.First, their linguistic accountability for staging narrative structure is trapped in formalist grammar.Bruner (1997) claims that this context-free grammatical analysis is a ‘failed clausal analysis’ (p.65) and thus a more discourse- and situation-directed approach to narrative analysis is needed.Many critiques to Labov and Waletzky’s model have suggested that deliberate elicitation of certain grammatical elements from a narrative means that it largely functions as a monologue that is ‘well-organized with a beginning, middle and an end’ (Georgakopoulou, 2011, p.397).Second, although Labov and Waletzky recognise the significance of the stage of Evaluation, they inappropriately set it as a segmental structure of the boundary between Complicating action and Resolution.The over-emphasis on the constituency of structure and experiential meaning leads them to fail to weave the evaluation of interpersonal meaning into the whole structure.Third, the deliberate exclusion of poorly formed stories but maintenance of a universal complication-resolution rule makes them neglect salient variations in the staging of stories.
The SFL-based narrative research (e.g., Eggins & Slade, 2004; Jordens, 2002; Macken-Horarik, 2003; Martin, 1996; Martin & Plum, 1997; Martin & Rose, 2009; Plum, 1988/1998; Rose, 2001a, 2001b, 2005b; Rothery, 1990; Rothery & Stenglin, 1997) has systematically identified, expanded and refined the narrative structures in types of storytelling such as casual conversations, stories of disease and treatment, literary fiction, stories of the use of pedagogic discourse, or children’s written stories.These researchers conversely start narrative analysis with the stage of Orientation and propose some different forms of disruption of expectant activity sequence embedded in the narrative structure.In particular, Plum (1988/1999) uses the genre-oriented approach to analyse 134 stories he recorded; accordingly, he finds that only 15% of them are identical with the stages of Complicating action and Resolution.He thus further distinguishes between the variants of staging associated with the other four generic story types in addition to narrative:recount, anecdote, exemplum and observation, which are summarised by Martin and Rose (2009) as a family of story genres in Table 6.1.
Table 6.1 A family of story genres
(from Martin & Rose, 2009, p.52)
While drawing the distinctions between these four story types, Martin and Rose (2009) notice that the staging of recounts is less likely to accommodate disruption in the unfolding of the event sequence, and thus suggest that recounts are much more concerned with the presence of timeline, along a sequential structure of informing (not instructing), events (not things), and expectation (not complicating).This valeur of meaning means that ‘recounts function in a wide variety of social contexts to share experiences and attitudes of all kinds’ (Martin & Rose, 2009, p.51).In this study, my analytical results of the six written personal recounts validate Martin and Rose’s identification of recounts in this sense (see the extracts presented in this chapter).
However, it is worth mentioning that the selection and production of storytelling also have an impact on its structures.In fact, I did not intend to collect the personal recounts at the very beginning.When I approached the six Chinese student participants, I asked whether they were willing to provide regular written, oral diaries or even short self-reflections about their disciplinary events and attitudes.I was planning to track and compare their histories of disciplinary experiences over time.Unfortunately, none of the six students accepted the request.They explained that they were very busy with study and social activities in the university.I then alternatively asked each of them to write a narrative about disciplinary experiences and of expectations.Interestingly, all of the collected written texts were structured as recounts alongside a timeline of past, present and future.If we recall the topic of the recount, ‘My expectations towards this semester’, the meaning of ‘expectation’ here in fact embodies a dynamic meaning, which to some extent limites the predictive narrative forms and potential productive results.
A similar phenomenon can be found in Lambrou’s (2007) study of narrative structure.Lambrou examines the influence of story topic on the selection and production of narrative structure categories and challenges a so-called universal narrative model, by specifically referring to Labov and Waletzky’s six-schemed narrative structure.She interviewed 45 members of the London-based Greek Cypriot (LGC) community and collected 279 stories; among them, 171 stories were identified as narratives, while 208 were distinguished as recounts.The results verified her hypotheses about the existence of narrative variation and the accountability of story topic to narrative structure.I therefore agree with her suggestion that narrative analysis should equally seek the prediction and description of the narrative features and functions, and the narrativised semantic content.Meanwhile, I would also like to suggest that the issue of translation in relation to narrative analysis should be another important concern when research deals with the original texts in a second or foreign language.My collected personal recounts were all originally in Chinese.Significantly, it is necessary to explain how the translation issue is tackled with.