Narratives beget narratives: rounds of stories in Turkish preschool conversations

Abstract

An ethnographic study of Turkish children's conversationally occasioned narratives indicates that one of the instigators of conversational narratives in children's talk is peer coparticipants' narratives. This paper examines Turkish preschool children's rounds of narratives in multi-party talk-in-interaction. The data come from 60 hours of naturalistically collected talk of preschool children aged 3-to-6 in two different preschools. The results show that rounds of narratives occur in certain types of multi-party settings, where the child participants conceived of the teacher as the mutual audience. The analyses of the data indicate that children often achieve thematic relevance with prior stories either through emulating the same content or introducing elaborations to the topics presented in prior narratives. The discussion focuses on the emergence of narratives as linguistic structures from certain participation configurations and sequential interactional positioning strategies in preschool group talk.