Keynote Speech:

Narrative analysis: finding models, methods, and meanings in personal stories

Abstract:

Narrative study includes theorizing and examining such activities as telling stories, giving accounts, sharing memories through relaying experienced events, perhaps in interviews, or imagining events in forms of creative fiction, fantasy, and myth-making. These are likely universal features of using and performing language which can analysed through narrative analysis. Personal narratives are locally contextualized for immediate or more remote audiences but often with globally relevant themes of much wider interest which are open to narrative analysis. Applications of narrative analysis can be related to cognition, emotion, socio-cultural, ethical-moral, and aesthetic dimensions of daily life or professional activity, besides historical, economic, legal, and political dimensions. This comprises a framework for analysis.

This presentation outlines approaches to narrative analysis as a research method which has been variously applied in social sciences but noticeably less in applied linguistics, although narrative data often emerge in interviews, professional work, and daily talk. However, there are research publications looking at teachers’ and learners’ stories which can be related to professional issues in language education. There are published personal stories of applied linguists, social scientists, and doctoral candidates in these disciplines, accessibly written up but remaining unanalysed as narratives. In Chinese local contexts, there are numerous autobiographical accounts of journeys of personal struggle and success in modern China, often marketed semiotically towards Western readers, which remain unanalysed from intercultural perspectives.

The presentation aims to show why narrative analysis is worthwhile, with a range of examples to show applied linguistic interest and to suggest why over 20 key questions in narrative analysis are important for research and teaching. There are suggestions for developing narrative as an element of critical-creative language teaching.