One crucial aspect that I need to address in my PhD study is justifying why my data is called 'narrative'. My PhD study aims to analyze native-type English speaking teachers' discursive positioning of Self and Others as teachers of culture. I plan to engage these participants in a conversation about their view of themselves as teachers of culture in their language teaching profession. But would these conversations I have with these teachers be considered 'narratives'?
The scholars who formally introduced positioning theory in the world of discourse analysis were L. van Langenhove and R. Harre (1999). They suggested that positions can be extracted from any types of discourse events, may it be a conversation, a monologue, an autobiographical text, or even emails. Now, here comes the problem. The terms that these scholars have used (you must have noticed by now that I am not using their surnames, forgive me but their names are just so foreign and hard to type), are hierarchical in the way they are presented. They begin with an overall term, "discourse event", before illustrating what a discoure event is by providing examples, such as conversations, autobiographies, etc. When explaining the positions in each of these examples, these scholars then introduce the term 'narrative'. For example, in a conversation provided on page 19, it is referred to as a 'narrative' and contains 'narrative elements'. This is a quandary, for me at least. Would a conversation be considered a narrative if it possesses narrative-like elements? For example, would a girl be considered a 'boy' if she sports a crew-cut hairstyle?
The reason for my concern is I do not want to contribute to the already burgeoning list of misnomers present in the field of applied linguistics (I will soon have a post on this where I discuss the differences between identity, role, position, and personhood). I am unsure as to whether or not I can directly say that a 'conversation' equals a 'narrative' since no direct statement was made between the two in van Langenhove and Harre's (1999) book on positioning theory.
Of course, I should not rely solely on van Langenhove and Harre's (1999) book. I went on to look at books written on teacher narratives. In examining two books on narrative studies (Webster and Mertova, 2007; Laboskey & Lyons, 2002), they were not clear with what narratives really are, though Laboskey and Lyons (2002) mention that it could be in the form of conversations.
Equating a conversation as being a narrative could be misleading. In a very recent book on teachers' narratives (Harbon & Maloney, 2013), narratives are in the form of self-reflection or observation which are then presented in the form of story-telling. This is different from studies published in journals of applied linguistics and behavioural sciences. I did a small preliminary review of the methodological sections of positioning studies which gathered data from 'narratives', and found that the type of narratives were conversation-like (Duff, 2002; Raddon, 2002; Frosh, et al., 2003), with the interviewer/researcher interjecting throughout the conversation at times when the interviewee/participant appeared to be digressing.
Okay, I get that we can extract positions from narratives by looking at linguistic features. But would the semi-structured interview I conduct with my participants be considered a 'narrative'? Perhaps one way of addressing this issue is to go with the broad meaning of a narrative. One common thread that binds the different studies that I have mentioned in this post is narrative is basically story-telling. Perhaps this is the reason why explanations and examples of narratives have been varied. Could it be that a discourse which contains elements of story-telling can be considered a narrative, even though its form may suggest otherwise?
I have the urge to write more, but I am more confused now compared to when I started this post.
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