liskin-gasparro 1996

Narrative Strategies: A Case Study of Developing Storytelling Skills by a Learner of SpanishAuthor(s): Judith E. Liskin-GasparroSource: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 271-286Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language TeachersAssociationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/329436 .Accessed: 26/09/2011 05:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell Publishing and National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations are collaboratingwith JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Modern Language Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=nfmlta

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=nfmlta

http://www.jstor.org/stable/329436?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

Narrative Strategies: A Case Study of

Developing Storytelling Skills by a

Learner of Spanish JUDITH E. LISKIN-GASPARRO

Department of Spanish and Portuguese 111 Phillips Hall Iowa City, IA 52242 Email: [email protected]

What does it mean to tell a "good story"? What strategies does the storyteller use to set the scene, move the action forward, and make sure the story has a point? For a second language speaker, how do these narrative strategies develop? This essay explores these questions by analyzing the narrative, descriptive, and evaluative structures of two stories about the same event told by the same speaker. The stories are drawn from oral proficiency interviews (OPIs) with the speaker, the first time when she was at the Intermediate High level and the second, when she was at the Advanced level. The discourse analysis revealed that the second

story surpasses the first in length, amount of narrative detail, systematic use of descriptive elements, and number and variety of evaluative devices. Rather than departing from the narrative structure of the first story, the second one builds upon the earlier version, using syntactic and lexical means to vary the pace of the action and draw the listener into the story.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO "TELL A GOOD

story" in one's second language? How do

speakers juggle the competing narrative demands of representing a multifaceted experience and the linguistic demands involved in

painting a verbal picture of past-time events and feelings? By examining the structure of two stories about the same event told by the same

speaker, we can explore the interaction between narrative strategies and the development of oral language skills. In the analysis below, the narrative, descriptive, and evaluative structures of the two stories are described and then com-

pared to illustrate, from the perspective of learner discourse, the development of the ability to tell a good story.

Although the speaker produced her two stories in the context of ACTFL oral proficiency interviews (OPIs), the first when she was at the Intermediate High level and the second when her speech was at the Advanced level, this is not

a study of the OPI or the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (ACTFL, 1986) per se. The focus of this analysis is, instead, on the discourse of a

particular speaker as her language progressed over time. The fact that the speaker told her second story when her overall proficiency was at the level associated with the ability to "narrate and describe in past time" (ACTFL, 1986) suggests some pedagogical approaches for working with students who are not yet at the Advanced level. These are explored in the concluding section of this study.

PREVIOUS STUDIES

The analysis undertaken here relies on an un-

derstanding of the structure of oral narratives of personal experience. Labov (1972), who studied the stories of African American inner city residents, was the first to define a fully formed oral narrative in terms of its structure. He identified six discrete moments: (a) the abstract, which usually comes at the beginning and summarizes the story that is to follow; (b) the orientation, which sets the action temporally and spatially; (c) the complicating actions, which

The Modern Language Journal, 80, iii (1996) 0026-7902/96/271-286 $1.50/0 ?1996 The Modern Language Journal

272 The Modern Language Journal 80 (1996)

are the narrative clauses that tell what happened; (d) the result or resolution, which is the culmination of the story line; (e) the evaluation, which draws attention to the most unusual

aspect of the story; and (f) the coda, which links the story with the "real world" and thus

brings the listener back to the present moment. Labov, who first elaborated the concept of evaluation, located it at the culminating point of the complicating actions, but he also showed that it has a secondary structure of its own and can be found in other parts of a story as well.

Researchers in storytelling consider evaluation to be the heart of a narrative. It consists of the devices used by the narrator to engage the listener, to ward off a possible response of "So what?":

Evaluative devices say to us: this was terrifying, dan- gerous, weird, wild, crazy; or amusing, hilarious, wonderful; more generally, that it was strange, un- common, unusual-that is, worth reporting. It was not ordinary, plain, humdrum, everyday, or run-of- the-mill (Labov, 1972, p. 371).

Later researchers (Polanyi, 1979; Schiffrin, 1984), who worked with oral narratives of personal experience produced by native speakers of English, often in a conversational setting, co- alesced Labov's six parts into three interwoven strands of information. Each of the strands serves as context for the other two: the narrative, or event, structure provides the "temporal context," a marking of time as each event takes

place; the descriptive structure provides information about setting and characters; and the evaluative structure "acts to tell the audience what the narrator feels is crucial information in the story" (Polanyi, 1979, p. 209). Polanyi incor-

porated all of Labov's elements into her model, but took a richer, more textured approach to their organization. Not only did she conceive of each element as interacting with the others, but she also viewed evaluation as having a more per- vasive role in the entire story, where even such

things as intonation, repetition, and stress were seen as contributing to the evaluative force of the story. Thus, it is impossible to understand how a story conveys its full meaning without

analyzing how the various levels of discourse work together (Schiffrin, 1984, p. 313).

Whereas there is a significant body of research that compares narrative strategies by native speakers across cultures, much less investi- gation has been done on narratives produced by second language (L2) learners. The few studies that have been carried out indicate that

language learners seem to approach the sto-

rytelling task with the same underlying expectations and goals that they have in the native language, but with limitations stemming from their

imperfect grasp of the linguistic code. Dechert (1983), for example, found that his subject, a native speaker of German, seemed to rely on

metalinguistic processing strategies-as well as on an underlying understanding of how a story should be built-to overcome particular lexical and syntactic difficulties that arose as she was

telling a story in English. Similarly, Rintell (1989) found that both learners and native

speakers of English seemed to draw from the same set of discourse strategies to convey emotion in narratives, but that learners had a much smaller repertoire of strategies to bring to bear on the narrative task. In a case study of narratives produced by a learner of Moroccan Arabic, Fakhri (1984) found that the speaker put a high priority on evaluation in her stories, although the evaluative strategies she chose were not al-

ways sociolinguistically appropriate. The current study continues the line of inves-

tigation of the structure of oral narratives

through microanalysis of individual stories. The

longitudinal approach taken in this study, in contrast to cross-sectional or one-time data col- lections, enables us to get a closer look at the

language acquisition process for this one

speaker, particularly the ways in which her in-

creasing mastery of the linguistic code enables her to expand her repertoire of narrative

strategies.

THE SUBJECT AND HER STORIES

Background Information

Kathy (not her real name) was a 21-year-old undergraduate student who was pursuing a double major in Spanish and biology. Prior to the 1989 summer session at the Middlebury Col-

lege Spanish School, she had studied Spanish for three years in secondary school and five se- mesters in college, followed by one semester in Madrid in the spring of 1989. Her oral proficiency in Spanish was rated Intermediate High at the beginning of the summer session and Ad- vanced at the end.

By coincidence, Kathy recounted the same incident, her "nightmare in Madrid," during both of her oral proficiency interviews. Here, told without embellishment, are the facts of Kathy's experience.

On her first night out in the city, Kathy met

Judith E. Liskin-Gasparro 273

with a group of friends and quite late, about 3:00 a.m., took a taxi to the home of the family with whom she was living. When they arrived at

Kathy's destination, the cab driver tried to

overcharge her. When she objected, he snatched her purse, removed her money, and started to drive off. Kathy grabbed her purse back, jumped out of the moving cab, and made her

way to her apartment building. As she was fum-

bling with the lock on the heavy door to her

building, she was surrounded by a group of

youths, who harassed her by touching her and

speaking threateningly. One of the youths stole the earrings she was wearing. Several cars

passed by, and after several minutes one stopped. The driver, who was a woman, got out of her car, made the youths leave, and helped Kathy get into her building.

Methodology

The analysis of narrative structure in this

study used the work of Labov (1972) and Polanyi (1979, 1982, 1985) as a base, with the following goals in mind: (a) identify the narrative, durative-descriptive (or "orientational," using Labov's terminology), and evaluative clauses in each story; (b) classify the evaluative clauses and the devices used to accomplish the evaluation; and (c) draw comparisons between the structures of Kathy's two stories.

Following Polanyi (1985, pp. 16-30), the process of analysis began with the physical division of each story into clauses that were independ- ent, subordinate, or elliptical. These clauses were numbered for reference in the analysis. Discourse markers, such as bueno, pero, y, oh (well, but, and, oh) and the like, were incorporated into the clause in which they were used.

Although the discourse markers were not sub-

jected to syntactic analysis, they were considered in the study of evaluation strategies. Each clause was then classified as either belonging or not belonging to the storyworld. Nonstoryworld clauses, such as reference to or commentary on the action, are by definition evaluative because they draw the listener's attention to particular moments in the story.

The storyworld clauses were then further di- vided into two categories: those that advanced the story line and those that did not. Native speakers of Spanish convey story line information by the preterit, present perfect, or histori- cal present. Those clauses whose verbs did not fulfill these criteria were categorized as durative-descriptive. Divergent interlanguage verb

forms were classified according to the intended

target. The next step was the consideration of eval-

uation in the story, a much less straightforward operation than the identification of narrative and durative-descriptive clauses. According to

Polanyi (1985), evaluation is the "process of as-

signing prominence" (p. 14) of certain moments or aspects of a story over others. It is

completely at the discretion of the narrator as to which aspects are highlighted:

In telling a story, the narrator has two tasks: to give enough detail so that interlocutors understand the nature of the change brought about, and to differ- entiate among the various events and states which are used to tell the story so that it is clear to the interlocutors precisely which complex of circum- stances and events should be used to infer the point being made (p. 14).

The analysis of the evaluative elements in each story began with a three-step procedure developed by Polanyi (1985, pp. 19-20) to iden-

tify "distinctive encodings" at both the clause and the discourse levels-repetitions of words, phrases, or clauses, redundancy of proposi- tional content, extensive details, delays in giv- ing expected information, and the like. The

analysis also identified nonstoryworld clauses- the obvious comments on the action by the narrator. The process of analysis took into account Labov's (1972) examples of syntactic evaluative devices, such as modification, the use of com-

parators, superlatives, and negative sentences, as well as Polanyi's (1979) and Schiffrin's (1984) examples. The analysis of evaluation in each

story then proceeded, based on the master list of evaluative devices derived from the above- mentioned sources.

An additional word may be in order here about the qualitative nature of the analysis, es-

pecially the degree to which the identification of evaluative devices in an oral text can be a cut- and-dried procedure that will be identical from one listener to the other. It appears to be far more an interpretive operation dependent on the degree to which the listener and the teller

"get into" the story. Polanyi (1979) stated that there are no absolute evaluative devices per se; she was of the opinion that "as a general princi- ple... anything which departs from the norm of the text can act evaluatively by drawing attention to itself, and also to the material which surrounds it" (pp. 209-210). Similarly, "any device available for evaluation can be used non- evaluatively as well or can be so over-used that it becomes a textual norm" (1985, p. 14). This phe-


nomenon is often found with the use of profanity: An obscene expression or gesture can have great evaluative impact in a story if used at a key moment, but profanity that is overused ceases to have any impact at all. Thus, the evaluative richness of a text seems to be in part a function of the narrative and linguistic skill of the storyteller, but also in part the result of the interaction between narrator and audience; the more sensitive the listener is to the nuances of the speaker's narrative style, the more evaluative devices the story will appear to have.

Transcription Conventions

As described above, the transcriptions break the story into clauses that are either independ- ent, subordinate, or elliptical (e.g., tocandome

[touching me] is interpreted as estaban tocdandome

[they were touching me] and thus counts as a clause). Longer-than-usual pauses, whether filled or unfilled, are indicated by three dots, and words that are represented by the narrator as a direct quotation are contained in quotation marks. Occasional interventions by the OPI interviewer that interrupt Kathy's flow of

speech are inserted in brackets; in some cases, large brackets are used to indicate that Kathy goes on to complete her sentence after the

interruption.

Kathy's Intermediate High Story. The transcribed texts of both stories, including English translations, are printed in Appendixes A and B. For the purposes of identification, they are referred to as the "Intermediate High" story and the "Advanced" story, which correspond to the ratings of the OPI from which they were drawn. The English translation for each story is

printed next to the Spanish version. Some notes about particular clauses in the

Intermediate High story may be in order here. In clause 4, Kathy used a false cognate; she meant to say "grabbed" but instead used the word for "tape record." In clause 7, she used another false cognate; she meant to say "took" but came up with the word for "touched."

The translation of clause 17 reflects Kathy's grammatical self-correction. Instead of the target era por la noche (it was nighttime), she first uses the perfective aspect: fJ por la noche (it happened at night). Although both utterances are grammatically correct, they have different meanings, and Kathy makes it clear that her intention here was to describe the scene, rather than to narrate an event.

Kathy's Advanced Story. Kathy's second story, told when her overall proficiency was at the Ad- vanced level, is printed in Appendix B. Note the

spacing in the transcription of lines 2-2a, which reflects the overlaps in the speakers' turns. The interviewer's question interrupted Kathy, who went on to complete her sentence. In clause 10 and clause 17, the accent mark on agarro (grabbed) and maquina (machine) indicates the

mispronunciation on Kathy's part.

ANALYSIS OF THE STORIES

Narrative Structure: The Main Story Line

According to Labov (1972), the story line is the basis of a narrative; his minimum require- ment for an account to be considered a narrative is that itjoin together two or more narrative clauses that report on events in the order in which they occurred. According to this definition, both of Kathy's accounts are narratives. But the difference in the length of the narratives is striking: 20 clauses in the Intermediate

High version versus 56 in the Advanced version. Her story has two episodes: being robbed by a cab driver and then being harassed by a group of youths. Only in the Advanced narrative does

Kathy explain clearly that both events occurred on the same night.

The narrative clauses form the backbone of the story line. As discussed above, these are clauses that advance the action. In native-like

speech, they would be encoded in verbs that are active, affirmative, and completive (Polanyi, 1985). A comparison of the narrative clauses of

Kathy's two stories reveals the strikingly greater narrative detail that she brings to the task as an Advanced-level speaker. A comparison of the first episode of each story provides ample illustration.

In her earlier story, Kathy produces a skeletal narrative account of the events of the first episode. She expands her abstract (clauses 1-2) with only two additional story line clauses, one of them incomplete, which are followed in clause 8 by a repetition of the summarizing statement in clause 2. The narrative clauses of the first episode are printed below.

1. si tenia, tuve dos ex- 1. yes, I used to have, periencias malas de I had two bad ex- crimen periences with

crime 2. un taxista me rob6 2. a cab driver

robbed me


4. grabW mi ... mi ... 4. he grabbed my... bolsa y my ... purse and

7. l toco. . . 7. he took ... 9. entonces, pues, me 9. then, well, he

robd robbed me

The narrative structure of the earlier story finds fuller voice in the later version. The narrative clauses are greater in number, providing more details of the story's events, as can be seen in the first episode.

4. regrese a mi casa sola, 4. I went home alone, pero en un taxi but in a taxi

7. fui 7. I left 8. cogi un taxi 8. I caught a cab 9. y al llegar a mi casa 9. and when I got

RI me pidio mucho mas home, he asked for dinero much more money

13. y yo pregunti por que 13. and I asked why 15. pero si 15. but yes 16. y R se enfado 16. and he got mad 17. y agdrro mi bolsa 17. and he grabbed

my purse 18. y d tomo todo el di- 18. and he took all

nero alli the money in it 19. y empezo a conducir 19. and he started to

otra vez drive again 21. entonces yo agarre' 21. so then I grabbed

mi bolsa my purse 22. salti del coche 22. I jumped out of

the car 24. y bueno, me asusto 24. and well, he really

bastante scared me

A marked difference between the narrative structures of the first episode of Kathy's two stories is the amount of detail that is incorporated into the narrative, or event, clauses of the main story line. In her later version, Kathy in- cludes information about what she did, what the cab driver did, and how she reacted. The richness of her lexicon, particularly her verbs, has grown. In the first episode of her earlier narrative, the only semantically appropriate verb she produces is robar (to steal). In the first episode of the Advanced story, in contrast, she produces a variety of verbs signalling physical action (regresar, ir, coger, agarrar, tomar, saltar [to return home, to go, to take (a taxi), to grab, to take, to jump]), verbs of communication (pedir, preguntar [to ask for, to ask a question]), and verbs of emotion (enfadarse, asustar [to get mad, to scare]).

One might be tempted to attribute the brev- ity of Kathy's earlier narrative to her two lexical problems: first with grabar (to tape record),

which the interviewer forces her to confront as an inappropriate choice for "to grab," and immediately afterwards with tocar (to touch), which Kathy corrects on her own. But counter- evidence is presented by the narrative clauses of the second episode, printed below, which are almost as brief and scarce in detail, even without the lexical difficulties that beset the first.

10. cincoj6venes me ro- 10. five young guys dearon surrounded me

11. y me molestaron bas- 11. and they really tante bothered me

15. me asustaron bas- 15. they really scared tante me

16. despuds de unos mi- 16. after a few min- nutos una mujer... utes a woman ... uh ... vino para uh ... came to ayudarme help me

Less immediately apparent than the difference in the amount of narrative detail is a strik-

ing similarity in narrative structure between the first episodes of the two stories-the framing function of the first and last narrative clauses. In the Intermediate High story, clause 8 summarizes, through the device of repetition, the central event of the first episode and, at the same time, brackets the details reported in the intervening clauses. In the Advanced story, Kathy uses the same narrative framing device, but in a far more elaborate form. Clause 4 both fore- shadows and summarizes one of the central events of the first episode-that she was alone and that the incident took place in a taxi. The

dangers inherent in this situation are hinted at by the word sola (alone), but are counter- manded by the phrase pero en un taxi (but in a taxi), indicating her belief, which she states immediately afterwards in clauses 5-6, that going home alone late at night in Madrid is safe if one takes a taxi, as opposed to using the subway or going on foot. At the end of the episode, she summarizes the effect of the events on her: y bueno, me asust6 bastante (and well, he really scared me) (clause 24). The preterit form asusto (scared) here is not the last in a chronol- ogy of the events of the episode (fui, cog~ pidi6, pre- guntM, se enfad6, agdrro, ... salti [I left, I caught, I asked, he got mad, he grabbed ... I jumped]) because the act of scaring her did not occur after all of the other events she reported. Rather, asust6 represents Kathy's summary of the events. All of the horrible things that happened to her-having her expectations of safety totally contradicted, having her purse snatched and her money taken, and having to


jump out of a moving vehicle-are summarized by the understated y bueno, me asust6 bastante (and well, he really scared me).

Another parallelism between the two stories is that Kathy's reactions to and feelings about her experience are incorporated into the narrative structure. The expression of a narrator's feelings about the events of his or her story is an evaluative device, and it is significant that Kathy, as both an Intermediate High and Ad- vanced speaker, has the linguistic resources to weave evaluative elements throughout her tale, even within the recounting of the actual events themselves. In the first episode of the Inter- mediate High version, for example, the two clauses of the second episode that summarize Kathy's encounter with the youths (that they "bothered" her [clause 11] and "scared" her [clause 15]) focus on her feelings about them. In her Advanced narrative, Kathy expresses her emotions not only in the summary statement y bueno, me asusto bastante (and well, he really scared me) (clause 24) at the end of the first

episode, but also in her statement at the end of the second episode, y lloraba toda la noche (and I cried all night) (clause 49).

Descriptive Structure: Contextualizing Elements

Using Polanyi's (1979) model, the descriptive clauses are, like the narrative clauses, part of the storyworld, but they differ from narrative clauses in that they do not advance the action of the story in temporal order. These clauses, termed "orientational" by Labov (1972), com-

prise the descriptive structure of a narrative.

According to Polanyi (1985), the descriptive structure of a story is composed of durative-

descriptive clauses. These clauses belong to one of three categories: (a) storyworld main clauses that are not on the main story line; (b) sto-

ryworld subordinate clauses, including indirect

speech; and (c) all direct speech. Also belonging to the descriptive structure are adverbials of time or manner or other phrases, which may be

incorporated into narrative clauses (e.g., regrese a mi casa sola, pero en un taxi [I went home alone, but in a taxi]) (Advanced, clause 4). The adver- bial phrase pero en un taxi (but in a taxi), although syntactically part of the narrative main clause, describes the manner of return, and thus fulfills a descriptive, or orientational, function. Given the syntactic variety that char- acterizes oral narrative, orientational/descriptive material may also appear in stand-alone phrases (e.g., Si, mi primera noche saliendo a la ciu-

dad [Yes, my first night going out in the city]) (Intermediate High, clause 3).

The primary function of durative-descriptive clauses and other orientational/descriptive material is to provide the context in which the action, reported in the narrative clauses, takes place. Labov's (1972) framework stressed the location of orientational material prior to the narration of the episode, whereas Polanyi (1979) demonstrated that orientational/descriptive material can be intercalated between and even within the narrative clauses. Indeed, according to Polanyi (1979), the descriptive structure provides context for both the narrative and evaluative structures. It has been shown above that some of the narrative clauses not only advance the action but also serve an evaluative function by drawing attention to those elements of the story that the narrator believes to be most noteworthy.

As with the narrative clauses, Kathy's earlier story has far fewer descriptive clauses than does her later account. For purposes of illustration, the section in the second episode, in which the youths surround her and threaten her, will be

compared. In the Intermediate High story, this section is

rendered by three descriptive clauses (12-14), which provide details about the "how" and "what" of the harassment Kathy experienced, thus providing context for the main story line. The descriptive material of the second episode is presented in its narrative context.

10. cinco j6venes me ro- 10. five young guys dearon surrounded me

11. y me molestaron bas- 11. and they really tante bothered me

12. tocandome 12. touching me 13. y gritando cosas ... 13. and yelling things

14. "rubia, ique tal?" 14. "blondie, how're ya doing?"


In contrast to the generic molestar (bother), the specific lexical items tocar (touch) and gritar (yell) paint a vivid verbal picture of what actu-

ally happened. The direct speech in clause, "rubia, ique' tal?" (blondie, how're ya doing?), is even more graphic, providing context for the summary statement me asustaron bastante (they really scared me) (clause 15) immediately following.

In addition to standing out semantically from the rest of Kathy's story, clauses 12-14 are also


syntactically distinctive. For the first time Kathy uses participles (tocdndome, gritando [touching me, yelling]), which can be interpreted as elliptical forms of progressive constructions: estaban tocdndome (they were touching me) and estaban

gritando cosas (they were yelling things). Clause 14 is the only example of direct speech in the narrative. These syntactic anomalies have an evaluative function, which will be discussed below in the section on evaluation.

In her later narrative, Kathy uses progressive constructions to slow down the action, inviting the listener to focus not on what happened, as is the case with narrative clauses in the perfective aspect, but on what was going on at particular moments in time. Kathy expresses what the

youths did to her not as completed events but as actions in progress. The durative-descriptive clauses of the second episode of the Advanced narrative follow. Clause 31, a narrative clause, is included to indicate the narrative context in which Kathy places her descriptive material.

31. y unos j6venes de 16, 31. and some young 18 arios, cinco ... guys about 16, 18 cinco me acercaron years old, five ...

five surrounded me

33. diciendo cosas 33. saying things 34. "oye, rubia, ven con 34. "hey, blondie,

nosotros, dadadada" come with us, dadadada"

35. tocdndome 35. touching me 36. y agarrando mis 36. and grabbing my

pendientes earrings 40. poniendo sus manos 40. putting their

por todas partes en hands all over my mi cuerpo body

41. y asustdndome mds 41. and scaring me

que el taxista more than the cab driver

The contextualizing function of the descriptive elements in this segment is enhanced by the participles, which can be interpreted as elliptical forms of the imperfect progressive. Silva-

Corvalan (1983) has pointed out that "progressive constructions occur in restricted clauses as part of the complicating action" (p. 765) and can be used to paint verbal pictures of actions co-occurring in the past. Such is the case in the descriptive segment quoted above. All of the actions Kathy mentions-the group of youths threatening her verbally, touching her, grabbing her earrings-are seen as happening at the same time. Her fear is also expressed in the progressive (clause 41). This contrasts with Kathy's

expression of fear in the Intermediate High narrative, where she uses a summarizing preterit form. In the Advanced story, her fear is not per- ceived as completed, but rather as coexisting with the frightening events being recounted.

In both of Kathy's stories, the descriptive material contextualizes and supports the narrative structure, even while serving an orientational function. In addition, it provides abundant evaluation of the main points of the narratives, thus confirming Polanyi's (1979) contention that the descriptive structure is tightly con- nected to the evaluative structure.

Evaluative Structure: Highlighting the Point of the Story

The function of evaluation in a narrative is to get the point of the story across to the listeners. A narrator has numerous ways to draw attention to particular aspects of the story. Evaluative devices fall into two main categories: (a) external evaluation, in which the narrator points to something in the story from an outside perspective; and (b) internal evaluation, in which the

highlighting of crucial events is integrated into the story itself (Labov, 1972; Polanyi, 1979). In Kathy's Advanced narrative, for example, her comment no si por qui [robaron mis pendientes] (I don't know why [they stole my earrings]) (clause 39) is an external evaluation device because it expresses astonishment from the narrator's current deictic center about something that happened in another time and space. In contrast, the repetition of a single event in three consecutive or closely spaced clauses is an internal evaluation device; it expresses the narrator's shock through clauses belonging to the

storyworld.

36. y agarrando mis 36. and grabbing my pendientes earrings

37. agar6n mis pendien- 37. they grabbed my tes earrings

38. robaron mis pen- 38. they stole my ear- dientes rings

Table 1 presents the repertoire of evaluative devices in Kathy's two stories. An example of each is given, as well as the location of the devices.

Although the overall frequency of clauses in the Intermediate High and Advanced stories that contain evaluative devices is comparable (35% and 37% of the clauses, respectively), Kathy has a wider evaluative repertoire as an Advanced-level speaker. As Table 1 shows, she


TABLE 1 Evaluation Devices Used in Kathy's Narratives

Evaluation device External/ Example Location: Location: Internal IH story Adv.

story

Comment on action: External me asustaron bastante (IH:15) 15 24, 39, 50 brief comment they really scared me

Comment on action: External perofue por la noche, era por la noche .. . y 17-20 51-55, 57

longer reflection estaba en una . .. un calle muy ... muy oscuro (IH:17-20) but it happened at night, it was nighttime .. . and I was on a... a very ... very dark street

Reference to External y asustdndome mdis que el taxista (A:41) none 5-6, 14

previous action and scaring me more than the cab driver

Ironic aside External y no debei'a haber hecho [laughs] esto (A:14) none 41 and I shouldn't have done this

Retarding narrative Internal tocdndome /y gritando cosas (IH:12-13) 12-13 30, 33, 35- actions: gerunds touching me/and yelling things 36, 40-41 (progressive constructions

Retarding narrative Internal salti del coche / que estaba en marcha (A:22- 2/3 19/20, action: juxtaposition of 23) 22/23 narrative I jumped out of the car/that was moving and descriptive clauses

Direct speech Internal "oye, rubia, ique tal?" (IH:14) 14 34 "blondie, how're ya doing?"

Repetiton: lexical Internal . . . cinco, yo creo, cinco me acercaron (A:31) 11/15, 20 1, 31, and/or syntactic . . . five, I think, five surrounded me 36/37/38

Contrast Internal regrese a mi casa sola, pero en un taxi (A:4) none 4 I returned home alone, but in a taxi

Expressive phonology Internal y oof (A:48) and oof none 48

Lexical choice Internal y unosj6venes . .. me acercaron / y empezo a none 31/46, gritar a los hombres (A:31/46) 35/40 and some young guys ... surrounded me/and she started to yell at the men

used 6 different evaluation devices in her Inter- mediate High story and 11 in her Advanced

story. This expansion of her repertoire can be seen in Table 2.

Kathy's story appears to have two main

points: (a) What happened to her was very frightening; and (b) She was an innocent victim, vulnerable to attack because she was new in Madrid and did not know how to take care of herself. Kathy uses all her evaluative devices to

highlight these two points, following a pattern that is described below.

External evaluation. The external evaluation devices in Kathy's stories conform to a pattern: When they occur at the end of an episode or se-

quence of events within an episode, they highlight

Kathy's fear; but in mid-episode, their function is to emphasize her role as the innocent victim.

The most frequent external evaluation device in both of Kathy's narratives, comments on the action, can be either brief comments or longer reflections. In the Intermediate High narrative, these comments mark the end of an episode (clauses 17-20) or the end of a sequence of actions within an episode (clause 15). The comments use almost identical words, and they highlight the fear she was experiencing.


17. pero fue por la noche, 17. but it happened era por la noche at night, it was

nighttime,


TABLE 2 Frequency of Internal and External Evaluative Devices

Intermediate High Advanced narrative narrative

Occurrences of 2 8 external evaluation

Occurrences of 5 13 internal evaluation

Frequency of evaluation 35% (7 clauses of 20 in story) 37% (21 clauses of 57 in story)

Repertoire: number of 6 11 different evaluation devices used

18. entonces me asustaron bastante antes

19. porque no habia nadie

20. y estaba en una . . . un calle muy ...

muy oscuro (laugh)

18. so they really scared me before

19. because there was

nobody around 20. and I was in a ...

a very ... very dark street

(laugh)

6 que en un taxi es bastante seguro (laugh)

13. y yo pregunti por que 14. no deberia haber

hecho (laugh) esto

6. that in a cab

you're really safe (laugh)

13. and I asked why 14. I shouldn't have

done (laugh) this

This evaluative strategy is preserved in the Advanced narrative: the brief comments in clause 24 and clause 50, which mark the end of the first and second episodes, respectively. In the first case, Kathy highlights the fear she experienced, whereas in the second case, she evaluates the whole story by commenting on her global reaction to the entire sequence of events.

24. y bueno, me asust6 bastante

50. era horrible

24. and well, he really scared me

50. it was horrible

The ironic aside is a variation on the comment on the action. In the first episode of her Ad- vanced narrative, Kathy comments twice on the action as it is unfolding, laughing ruefully at her own innocence, first in thinking that taking a taxi would guarantee her safety (clauses 5-6) and, later, in questioning a cab driver who was, in retrospect, obviously out to take advantage of her (clause 14). It is noteworthy that the location of these external evaluation devices matches their function: Mid-episode evaluation highlights Kathy's role as the innocent victim. This can be seen in the excerpt that follows. Note that clause 13 is included to provide the context for the ironic aside in clause 14.

5. alguien me habia dicho

5. someone had told me

Another mid-episode comment in the Ad- vanced narrative that highlights Kathy's role as innocent victim is clause 39: no sepor que (I don't know why). She is commenting here on the fact that the youths stole her earrings. Her astonishment that they would do such a senseless thing (the listener infers that the earrings were not at all valuable) is communicated through both the repetition of the fact that they stole her earrings (clauses 36-38) and her comment of bewilderment in clause 39.

The device of reference to a previous action has evaluative force when the narrator is highlighting the connection between the two events. While Kathy's Intermediate High story is lack- ing in cohesive devices-such that it is not even apparent that her two encounters with crime took place on the same night-her Advanced version ties the two incidents together in numerous ways. One strategy is the evaluative device of referring to a previous action: At the end of a sequence of actions in the second episode where she is being harassed by the youths, Kathy explicitly compares the fear she is experiencing with how she felt when she was at the mercy of the cab driver. Once again, an external evaluation device inserted at the end of a sequence of events highlights Kathy's fear: y asustdndome mds que el taxista (and scaring me more than the cab driver) (clause 41).


Internal evaluation. The overwhelming majority of the internal evaluation devices are located, as one would expect, in mid-episode. Unlike the mid-episode external evaluation devices, most of the internal evaluations highlight Kathy's fear, rather than her role as the innocent victim. They do so by either slowing down the action through syntactic means or by intensifying particular moments in the narrative stream through lexical means. Some examples of each device are explained below.

The device of slowing down the action enables the narrator to highlight certain aspects of a story. The analysis of the narrative and descriptive structures of Kathy's stories has already touched on the crucial role played by tense and aspect in distinguishing between events and states and, at a far more subtle level, in commu- nicating nuances of meaning. As Fleischman (1990, p. 199) pointed out, and as the discussion of the structure of Kathy's oral narratives has confirmed, it is not a simple matter to convert a personal experience, especially one rife with emotion, into a linear narrative. Neither is it in the interest of the narrator to construct her story as a linear sequence of events, because to do so would almost certainly reduce her mixed emotions of extreme fear and innocent indig- nation-the point of the story-to the least common denominator among the events that are being recounted. The inherently flat, un- marked narrative line at the base of Kathy's story is frequently interrupted and enriched by departures from it-descriptive comments about the setting or the characters and evaluative devices that mark some events as highly im-

portant or unusual in comparison to the rest.

Among the decisions that a narrator must make is how to select among the available syntactic options to re-create an experience in the form of an oral narrative. According to Fleisch- man (1990), tense and aspect are "boundary markings [that establish] the 'space' of the text" (p. 199). Students of another language, who are constrained by their imperfect grasp of the linguistic code, including its morphosyntac- tic rules, have the double task of remembering the rules for constructing sentences in the past and then manipulating the rules to paint a verbal picture-establish the sequence of events, make some events more salient than others, express some events as punctual and others as durative, and the like.

Kathy's Intermediate High story departs little from the linear recounting of events. In the first episode, only clause 5, which places the story in

its chronological context, moves the story off its narrative line. In the second episode, Kathy in- terrupts the narrative line with direct speech (clause 14) and with elliptical progressive constructions (clauses 12-13). The following excerpt shows how the choice of the progressive highlights Kathy's fear by depicting the actions of touching and yelling as happening repeat- edly over time.

10. cincojcvenes me rodearon

11. y me molestaron bastante

12. tocadndome 13 y gritando cosas

10. five young guys surrounded me

11. and they really bothered me

12. touching me 13. and yelling things

The discussion of the descriptive structure of the Advanced narrative showed how Kathy uses the imperfective aspect to slow down the action, lingering on those moments of the story that either set the stage for the action or highlight her fear. The choice of imperfective aspect and

progressive constructions thus enriches the narrative overall by departing from the strict linear

recounting of events. Schiffrin (1981) has made the point that "in a story about fear, a cluster of

progressive verbs occurs at the high point of the account.. ." (p. 59).

The two-clause sequence of progressives in the Intermediate High story is significantly ex-

panded in the Advanced narrative.

33. diciendo cosas 35. tocadndome 36. y agarrando mis

pendientes 40. poniendo sus manos

por todas partes en mi cuerpo

41. y asusttdndome mds que el taxista

33. saying things 35. touching me 36. and grabbing my

earrings 40. putting their

hands all over my body

41. and scaring me more than the cab driver

The use of the progressive aspect here paints a picture of these events occurring iteratively; the implied imperfective aspect-[estaban] diciendo (they were saying), [estaban] tocandome

(they were touching me, etc.)-augments the effect by depicting the events as also occurring simultaneously.

Another way in which Kathy exploits the as-

pectual richness of the Spanish language is by juxtaposing perfective and imperfective utterances. Like the use of progressive constructions, this juxtaposition of perfective and im-

perfective also slows down the pace of the action. As a speaker at the Advanced level, she


has gained sufficient control of the verbal system to be able to set narrative (N) and descriptive (D) clauses next to each other, thus height- ening the frightening aspects of the situation. This can be seen in two instances in the first episode of the Advanced narrative.

N 19. y empezo a conducir otra vez

D 20. y yo todavia estaba [alli] ...

N 22. salti del coche

D 23. que estaba en marcha

N 19. and he started to drive again

D 20. and I was still [there] ...

N 22. I jumped out of the car

D 23. that was mov-

ing

She does not even need the external evaluative comment that follows y bueno, me asust6 bastante (and well, he/that really scared me) (clause 24) because the point that she was in a

terrifying situation has already been made

through the juxtaposition of perfective and im-

perfective verbs in the preceding clauses. In summary, Kathy's Advanced narrative

shows much greater ability to manipulate the

aspectual system than does her Intermediate High narrative. Through the aspectual manipu- lation she is able to change the tempo of her narrative, to suspend temporarily the passage of time, and to highlight both her emotions and the importance of some of the events.

In spite of the fact that Kathy's overall oral proficiency is at the Intermediate High and Ad- vanced levels, respectively, when she tells her two stories, accuracy in choice of tense and aspect is not a distinguishing feature between the two narratives. In her Intermediate High story Kathy twice catches herself in an aspect error (clauses 1, 17) and makes the correction as she produces the sentence. In her Advanced narrative, Kathy makes one incorrect tense/aspect selection (clause 49) and fails to correct it. The major difference between the two stories with respect to tense and aspect is not the incidence of error, but rather the ability of the speaker to exploit the aspectual richness of the language to re-create personal experience more vividly.

Whereas the use of progressive constructions and the juxtaposition of narrative and descriptive clauses evaluate particular events of the narrative by slowing down the action, other internal evaluation devices intensify particular moments in the action or in the surroundings. For example, repetition is a device that evaluates the immediate context in which it occurs by intensifying the impact of a particular word or phrase. Kathy has two repetitions in her Inter-

mediate High narrative and three in her Ad- vanced version. The discussion of the narrative structure of the earlier story has shown that the event clauses (11, 15) bracket the descriptive material between them. The syntactic and lexical parallelism between those two clauses is an evaluative device that intensifies the frightening and unpleasant impact of the experience.

Kathy's Intermediate High narrative has one repetition of a single lexical item. It occurs in the coda, where Kathy is reflecting on her fear. The repetition of muy (very) drives the point home.


20. y estaba en una . . . un calle muy ... muy oscuro


nobody around 20. and I was in a ...

a very ... very dark street

There are two repetitions of a single lexical item in Kathy's Advanced story (clauses 1, 31) and one that is extended over three clauses (36-38). The astonishment and bewilderment that Kathy states directly in the external evaluation in clause 39 with her no si por qud (I don't know why) have already been expressed via repetition in the preceding clauses.

36. y agarrando mis pendientes

37. agaron mis pen- dienths

38. robaron mis pendientes

36. and grabbing my earrings

37. they grabbed my earrings

38. they stole my earrings

The repetition of the key words agarrar (to grab) and pendientes (earrings) over three clauses highlights both the violence of the act and Kathy's shock that the youths would go to such lengths to steal a pair of earrings. Thus, this particular device evaluates both Kathy's fear of the potential violence of the situation and her stance as shocked innocent victim.

Another internal evaluation device that is found in both narratives is direct speech. Indeed, Kathy chooses the same context and almost the same words: rubia, gque tal? (blondie, how're ya doing?) (clause 14) in the Intermediate High narrative, and Oye, rubia, ven con nosotros, dadadada (hey, blondie, come with us, dadadada) (clause 34) in the Advanced narrative. This is the only instance of direct speech in each narrative; as such, it takes on evaluative significance just by its contrast with Kathy's narrative style in general. The fact that she reports the exact words the youths spoke communicates that this terri-


ble moment has been indelibly imprinted in her memory.

Brief mention should be made of three other evaluative devices found only in the Advanced story. There is one instance of expressive phonology, the oof in clause 48 that sums up both Kathy's building tension and its release once she was finally safe inside her house. There are two instances of lexical choice: the switch from

j6venes (young guys, youths) (clause 31) to hombres (men) (clause 41), which reflects and intensifies her fear; and the selection of particularly vivid or graphic vocabulary (i.e., the pairing of tocandome [touching me] (clause 35) and poniendo sus manos por todas partes en mi cuerpo [putting their hands all over my body]) (clause 40).

Finally, Kathy's one instance of contrast is regrese a mi casa sola, pero en un taxi (I went home alone, but in a taxi) (clause 4). The contrast

implicit in sola, pero en un taxi (alone, but in a taxi) indicates that although Kathy was doing something potentially risky (travelling alone at

night), she was really not putting herself in dan- ger because she had chosen a safe mode of

transportation. This contrast is immediately followed in clauses 5-6 by the ironic aside discussed above: alguien me habia dicho/que en un taxi es bastante seguro (someone had told me/that in a cab you're really safe). Because the ride home in the taxi turned out to be extremely dan-

gerous and frightening, it is appropriate that

Kathy's mistaken notion that cabs were safe be

heavily evaluated.

Summary

The major findings from the analysis of Kathy's two stories can be summarized as follows:

1. Both narratives can properly be called stories, according to the criteria established by Pol-

anyi (1982). 2. In both narratives, the events that form the

main story line are contextualized by means of

durative-descriptive clauses and shorter phrases that provide information about temporal and

spatial setting, characters, or other events that the narrator appears to consider subordinate to the main story line. The contextualization in the Intermediate High narrative occurs primar- ily through mid-episode durative-descriptive clauses that enable Kathy to convey the simul- taneity of actions, words, and feelings that com- prise the experience she is recounting. In the Advanced narrative, on the other hand, the contextualization is more complex and systematic: Each episode is preceded by an orientation that

sets the stage for the events that are to follow and contains mid-episode clauses that enhance the impact of the action as it unfolds.

3. Both stories contain evaluation of key propositions.

4. There are identifiable differences between the narrative, descriptive, and evaluative structures of Kathy's two stories. Kathy's Advanced story is considerably longer than her Intermedi- ate High story and treats the same events in far greater narrative detail. Kathy's Advanced story has a richer descriptive structure than does her Intermediate High story: The earlier narrative is almost completely devoid of orientational material that would set the stage for the narration of the main story line, whereas in her later narrative, she uses a variety of linguistic resources to provide context for her story. Finally, the Ad- vanced narrative has almost twice the number of evaluative devices as the Intermediate High story and uses them in a more elaborate and systematic way.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

As we have seen, the differences between

Kathy's Intermediate High and Advanced stories are differences of degree, rather than of kind. Rather than departing from the narrative structure of the Intermediate High story, the Advanced story builds upon the Intermediate

High version. These findings are in consonance with those

of Tomlin (1984), who found that when native

speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) told their versions of a silent film about a gold- fish, the NNSs incorporated fewer narrative details into their main story lines than did the NSs. Tomlin's conclusion, that the same cogni- tive processes may well be at work in the recast-

ing of experience into narrative, but that the

linguistic limitations of the NNS result in a more skeletal re-living of that experience, seems also to hold, in the case of Kathy, for the less- proficient NNSs.

Even as an Intermediate High speaker, Kathy uses her limited linguistic resources to evaluate the key points of her story. The prominent pres- ence of evaluative devices in her brief narrative is an indication of the importance of evaluation as a distinguishing feature between stories and other kinds of past-time discourse. Rintell (1989) and Fakhri (1984) also found that their NNS subjects evaluated the key points of their stories, even when these subjects had a limited grasp of the linguistic code.


The differences between Kathy's two stories

might be summarized under the general rubric of integration-integration of the elements of the story and integration of the speaker with her audience. For example, Kathy as an Ad- vanced speaker is able to maintain a substantial

descriptive component to her story while also

elaborating a detailed narrative line. Her earlier story tends to separate the narrative and

descriptive elements; it is only in her later narrative that she is able to join them together by juxtaposing narrative and descriptive clauses.

Another indication of integration in the stories, which is reflected in both the descriptive and evaluative structures, is the greater degree of audience awareness that Kathy enjoys as an Advanced-level speaker. Her considerably more extensive evaluative repertoire has already been discussed above. In addition, Kathy's inclusion of orientation and coda sections in her later

story is another manifestation of this awareness; through them she sets the stage for the action at the beginning and makes a bridge between the storyworld and present time at the end. These are narrative strategies that engage the listener more fully in the story and create a context in which the listener is more likely to grasp and appreciate the story's point.

Pedagogical Implications

Although it is not the focus of this paper to

suggest pedagogical applications, one might ask whether the storytelling skills manifested by Kathy, particularly in her Advanced story, can be taught in a language class. It may well be that students can progress more rapidly to a storytelling style that is rich in narrative detail, descriptive contextualization, and evaluative devices, such as Kathy's later narrative, with an

approach that helps them discover the structural, rhetorical frames that underlie the narrative genre. With the structural frameworks

brought to their conscious awareness, it is possible that students would be more able to focus on the mechanics of production in the L2.

Advanced conversation courses in L2 (Koike, personal communication, March, 1993) and public speaking courses in first language (L1) (Spencer, personal communication, January, 1987) both lend themselves to a discourse-based approach to oral skills development. An approach to teaching storytelling skills might include analyses of the oral narratives embedded in short stories or novels, as well as an emphasis on having students build their own stories from

the bottom up: first plotting the narrative line, then pinpointing where contextualizing detail would be effective, and, finally, inserting both internal and external evaluative devices at appropriate points.

Another approach that might bear fruit on both the research and pedagogical fronts would be to have students analyze their own oral narratives of personal experience in their native

language. Using their transcribed texts, they could be led to discover their own repertoires of evaluative devices, for example, as a prelude to

using them in L2 narratives.

Future Research

The analysis of two stories about the same event by one individual suggests some interest-

ing directions for future research on learner narratives. The urge to tell stories is universal, and it would appear from the analysis of Kathy's two narratives that the ability to tell a good story is comprised of one's personal narrative

style in combination with one's overall level of

linguistic skill. Kathy's rather skeletal earlier narrative still contained all of the elements of a

good story, albeit in a severely reduced form. With the development of her overall language skill, her narrative blossomed on all fronts, demonstrating expansion in length, breadth, and variety of rhetorical devices.

Future studies of learner narratives might well include comparisons between L2 and L1 stories about the same event told by the same individual. Both cross-sectional and longitundi- nal designs could shed light on the process of transfer of discourse strategies from L1 to L2. Larger-scale studies, such as those undertaken by Bardovi-Harlig and Reynolds (1995) and

Bardovi-Harlig and Bergstr6m (1996) for writ- ten narratives, could elucidate the relationship between oral narrative discourse and grammatical competence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am grateful to my colleague Kathryn Henry of the University of Iowa and to the anonymous MLJ re- viewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.


REFERENCES

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Lan-

guages. (1986). ACTFL proficiency guidelines. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: ACTFL.

Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Bergstr6m, A. (1996). Acquisi- tion of tense and aspect in second language and foreign language learning: Learners narratives in ESL and FFL. Canadian Modern Language Review, 52, 308-330.

Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Reynolds, D. W. (1995). The role of lexical aspect in the acqusition of tense and

aspect. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 107-131. Dechert, H. (1983). How a story is done in a second

language. In C. Faerch & G. Kasper (Eds.), Strategies in interlanguage communication (pp. 175- 195). London: Longman.

Fahkri, A. (1984). The use of communicative strate-

gies in narrative discourse: A case study of a learner of Moroccan Arabic as a second lan-

guage. Language Learning, 34, 15-37. Fleischman, S. (1990). Tense and narrativity: From medi-

evalperformance to modernfiction. Austin, TX: Uni-

versity of Texas Press.

Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Phila-

delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Polanyi, L. (1979). So what's the point? Semiotica, 25, 207-241.

Polanyi, L. (1982). Linguistic and social constraints on storytelling. Journal ofPragmatics, 6, 509-524.

Polanyi, L. (1985). Telling the American story: A structural and cultural analysis of conversational storytelling. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Rintell, E. (1989). That reminds me of a story: The use of language to express emotion by second-

language learners and native speakers. In M. Eisenstein (Ed.), The dynamic interlanguage: Empirical studies in second language variation

(pp. 237-257). New York: Plenum. Schiffrin, D. (1981). Tense variation in narrative. Lan-

guage, 57, 45-62. Schiffrin, D. (1984). How a story says what it means

and does. Text, 4, 313-346.

Silva-Corvalan, C. (1983). Tense and aspect in oral

Spanish narrative: Context and meaning. Lan-

guage, 59, 760-780. Tomlin, R. (1984). The treatment of foreground-

background information in the on-line

descriptive discourse of second language learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 6, 115-142.

APPENDIX A

Kathy's Intermediate High Story

1. si, tenia, tuve dos ex-

periencias malas de crimen

2. un taxista me rob6

[I: ?de veras?] 3. si, mi primera noche

saliendo a la ciudad [I: ?y c6mo pudo ro- barte?] 4. grab6 mi ... mi ...

bolsa y

[Interruption from In- terviewer (I) to focus attention on Kathy's lexical error] 5. grabar? no es grabar

6. ya se que estamos

grabando 7. 61 toc6 ... 8. ?c6mo se dice? 9. entonces, pues, me

rob6

1. yes, I used to have, I had two bad experi- ences with crime

2. a cab driver robbed me

[I: really?] 3. yes, my first night

going out in the city [I: and how did he rob

you?] 4. he grabbed

my... my... purse and

[Interruption from In- terviewer (I) to focus attention on Kathy's lexical error] 5. tape record? no, it is

not tape record 6. I know that we are re-

cording 7. he took... 8. how do you say? 9. well, then, he robbed

me

[I: esta es una experien- cia interesante ?y la otra?] 10. cinco j6venes me

rodearon 11. y me molestaron

bastante 12. tocaindome 13. y gritando cosas...

14. "rubia ?que tal?"

15. me asustaron bastante

16. despues de unos minutos una mujer ... uh... vino para ayudarme

17. pero fue por la noche, era por la noche

18. entonces me asustaron bastante antes


[I: this is an interesting experience and the other one?] 10. five young guys sur-

rounded me 11. and they really both-

ered me 12. touching me 13. and yelling

things. .. 14. "blondie, how're ya

doing?" 15. they really scared

me 16. after a few minutes a

woman ... uh... came to help me

17. but it happened at

night, it was nighttime,

18. so they really scared me before


nobody around


APPENDIX A continued

Kathy's Intermediate High Story

20. y estaba en una ... un calle muy... muy oscuro (laugh)

20. and I was in a... a

very ... very dark street (laugh)

APPENDIX B

Kathy's Advanced Story

1. mi primer fin de semana, fue el primer fin de semana

2. y habia estado en un bar, bueno, a las tres, muy tarde

[I: sola?] 2a. con unos amigos 3. no se? 4. regrese a mi casa

sola, pero en un taxi 5. alguien me habia

dicho 6. que en un taxi es

bastante seguro (laugh)

7. fui 8. cogi un taxi 9. y al llegar a mi casa 61

me pidi6 mucho mis dinero

10. que habia puesto en la maquina

11. ?c6mo se llama? 12. que cuenta el dinero

13. y yo pregunte por que

14. no deberia haber hecho (laugh) esto

15. pero si 16. y 61 se enfad6 17. y agirro mi bolsa

18. y 61 tom6 todo el dinero alli

19. y empez6 a conducir otra vez

20. y yo estaba todavia [I: alli] 21. entones yo agarre

mi bolsa 22. salte del coche

1. my first weekend, it was the first weekend

2. and I had been in a bar, well, at 3:00, very late

[I: alone?] 2a. with friends 3. I don't know 4. I went home alone,

but in a taxi 5. someone had told me

6. that in a cab you're really safe (laugh)

7. I left 8. I caught a cab 9. and when I got home,

he asked for much more money

10. than what was on the machine

11. how do you say it? 12. that counts the

money 13. and I asked why

14. I shouldn't have done (laugh) this

15. but yes 16. and he got mad 17. and he grabbed my

purse 18. and he took all the

money in it 19. and he started to

drive again 20. and I was still [I: there] 21. so then I grabbed

my purse 22. I jumped out of the

car

23. que estaba en marcha

24. y bueno, me asust6 bastante

25. y no podia entrar en mi casa

26. porque hay una puerta grande abajo

27. y hay que entrar

28. y la cerradura es

muy dificil en abrir 29. alli estaba 30. intentando abrir la

puerta 31. y unos j6venes de

16, 18 afios, cinco ... cinco me acercaron

32. yo creo 33. diciendo cosas 34. "oye, rubia, ven con

nosotros, dadadada" 35. tocindome 36. y agarrando mis

pendientes 37. agar6n mis pen-

dientes 38. robaron mis pen-

dientes 39. no s6 por que 40. poniendo sus manos

por todas partes en mi cuerpo

41. y asustindome mas

que el taxista

42. y habia pasado ... dos o tres coches

43. no hicieron nada

44. no se6

23. that was moving

24. and well, he really scared me

25. and I couldn't get into my house

26. because there is a

big door downstairs 27. and you have to go

through it 28. and the lock is very

hard to open 29. there I was 30. trying to open the

door 31. and some young

guys about 16, 18

years old, five ... five surrounded me

32. I think 33. saying things 34. "hey, blondie, come

with us, dadadada" 35. touching me 36. and grabbing my

earrings 37. they grabbed my ear-

rings 38. they stole my ear-

rings 39. I don't know why 40. putting their hands

all over my body

41. and scaring me more than the cab driver

42. and ... two or three cars had passed by

43. they didn't do anything

44. I don't know


APPENDIX B continued

Kathy's Advanced Story

45. pero por fin una

mujer sali6 de su coche

46. y empez6 a gritar a los hombres

47. y me ayud6 entrar en la casa

48. y oof... 49. y Iloraba toda la

noche y 50. seguro 51. que habian pasado

unos hombres antes

45. but finally a woman

got out of her car

46. and she started to

yell at the men 47. and she helped me

get into the house 48. and oof... 49. and I cried the

whole night and 50. surely 51. some men had

passed by before

52. que podrian ayudarme

53. me impresion6 bastante

54. que hay una mujer

55. que me ayud6 56. luego, pues, no se

57. tenia un poco de miedo por algunas semanas despues

52. who could help me

53. it really impressed me

54. that there is a woman

55. who helped me 56. well, then, I don't

know 57. I was a little afraid

for a few weeks afterwards

ML Home Page on the World Wide Web

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/mlj/

THE MLJIS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE ITS NEW HOME PAGE, UNDER CONSTRUCTION ON

the World Wide Web. We invite you to check it regularly for the most recent information on

upcoming articles and announcements, as well as titles and abstracts of available issues. Eventually, we will also provide links to sites that offer help in the publication process, such as information

about APA style. We ask for your patience as we create this site and, especially, for your input. Current plans include the following rubrics:

Information about the MLJ

Editorial Board Members

How to Submit a Manuscript

Most Recent Past Issues (titles of articles with abstracts)

Forthcoming Articles in the MLJ (with abstracts)

Announcements of Special Issues

Calendar of Events from "News and Notes of the Profession"

Advertising Information

Subscription Information

Links of Interest to Readers of the MLJ

liskin-gasparro 1996

Documents