Resumen

ALAM, Florencia. The interactional construction of fictional narratives between children of different ages: A study with children from marginalized urban populations. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2015, vol.32, n.1, pp.31-49. ISSN 1668-7027.

This study aims to analyse the interactional construction of fictional accounts that 4-year-old and 12-year-old children from marginalized urban populations in Buenos Aires (Argentina) produced together. Recent research (Gardner & Forrester, 2010; Rosemberg & Menti, in press) suggests the need to link the study of child development and performance with the micro-analysis of interaction. As these studies point out, the concepts developed by Conversation analysis (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982) allow to study in detail the processes through which children and their partners construct shared meaning in interaction. The narratives, elicited from a sequence of images, were video recorder and transcribed. The data corpus consist of 33 narratives produced by dyads of 4 and 12 year-old children. A qualitative analysis was performed that combined the Constant Comparative Method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) with tools from Interactional Sociolinguistic (Gumperz, 1982) and Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). This analysis allowed the generation of a system of categories that identified the narrative roles assumed by the participants (Goodwin, 2007) and how these roles were negotiated in the interaction. Findings showed that children adopted narrative roles that were configured from a juxtaposition of information from different semiotic fields -verbal, gestural and proxemic-. 4-year-old children adopted roles of storyteller or audience, and 12-year-old children assumed roles of tutor, storyteller or audience. The tutor role was characterised by the initiations of the sequence employing elicitations. Also, tutors used different types of interventions -feedback, expansions and repairs- to scaffold the narrative elaborated by the young children. The body position, as well as the gaze of the tutor was directed to the story-teller and/or to the images, and also in some cases to the researcher. The storyteller role was characterised by giving verbal information about the narrative. The body position, as well as the gaze of the storyteller was directed principally to the audience and/or to the images. Finally, the audience role was characterised for showing interest in the narrative through different signals such as gaze direction to the storyteller, and a body position close to him and to the images. These results show the productivity of articulating the psycholinguistic perspective (Nelson, 1996, 2007) with tools of the Conversational Analysis (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990) to account for narrative performance. Results showed that while the 12-year-old children tended to adopt in most cases a tutor role, the 4-year-old assumed a storyteller role. The narrative roles adopted by the children show that children from different ages can negotiate narrative co-construction.However, in some cases both children adopted a storyteller role. In these situations the asymmetric relation between the 12-year-old and the younger childled the older child to impose his narrative not letting the 4-year-old to narrate. The microanalysis of the interactional sequences showed that the roles adopted could change during the interaction. This role change did not occur randomly, but responding to the sequence of actions in which each participant analysed the contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982) provided by the other and acted according to them. The analysis of the exchanges showed the complexity of the interactional process with regard to the construction of the stories, in which it is not possible to comprehend the actions of one participant without referring to the actions of the other (Goodwin, 1984). The relevance of studying the narratives produced by young children interacting with older children lies in the results of previous studies (Stein & Rosemberg, 2012) which reported that in urban marginalized populations interactions be tween children of different ages can lead to learning and child development.

Palabras clave : Interaction between children; Interactional construction; Narrative roles; Microanalysis of interaction; Urban marginalised populations.

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