Eliciting narratives: Drawing attention to the margins of classroom talk

In this paper I describe two contrasting classroom contexts for eliciting personal narratives. Drawing from a larger study in which I followed one second language learner as he proceeded through 2nd and 3rd grade, my analysis is based on reading group interactions video-recorded weekly during the second semester of each year. Comparison of oral narrative elicitation, across years reveals two very different participation contexts. In one context narrative elicitation occurred primarily in two-person dialogue with the teacher. In another context oral narrative emerged through multi-party dialogue after the official lesson had closed. These contrasting contexts thus facilitated qualitatively different forms of co-tellership and as a consequence different opportunities for oral narrative. I intend this analysis of narrative elicitation to draw attention to the margins of classroom activity and by doing so to take a step toward a discourse-based solution to what has been recognized as a discourse-based problem in schools: differential access to oral preparation for literacy.