Beyond Chronicity: Evaluation and Temporality in Spanish-Speaking Children’s Personal Narratives

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Spanish-speaking children’s evaluation and temporality in the construction of personal narratives. The study analyzes 32 personal narratives produced by 8 Andean Spanish-speaking children from the Andean city of Cusco in Peru All children were monolingual speakers of the Andean Spanish variety and came from lower-middle-class families. Half the children were preschoolers (4;9 to 5;5 years) and the other half were first-graders (6;6 to 7;8 years). Both age groups were balanced in terms of gender. Children were interviewed and tape-recorded by the author using the ConversationalMap of Narratives of Real Experiences (McCabe & Rollins, 1994) as the elicitation procedure. Narratives were transcribed using CHAT conventions (MacWhinney, 2000) and were subsequently coded for narrative components (Peterson &McCabe, 1983) and temporal organization (Genette, 1980). Results indicated that contrary to the sequentiality and single-story structure reported as characteristic of U.S. European American English-speaking children, these Andean Spanish-speaking children’s narratives present a distinctive feature labeled herein as structural evaluation. Structural evaluation takes two forms, either (1) a functional deviation from the timeline of real events; or (2) a chain of independent stories connected within the boundaries of a single narrative. These young narrators used these strategies to evaluate a specific point in the narrative, consequently affecting both the temporal organization of events and the episodic complexity of the narratives. Deviations from the timeline are usually identified as indicators of language pathology or immaturity for U.S. European American English-speaking children. In these Andean children’s narratives, conversely, departures from the timeline served a rhetorical function that reflected a sophisticated discourse skill. Results highlight the need of data-driven interpretative approaches of Spanish-speakers’ narratives in a field increasingly focused on cultural/linguistic diversity but still dominated by Anglo-centric views of development.