Storytelling and stance-taking in group interaction

Abstract

This paper looks at two highly prevalent actions in naturally-occurring talk: stance-taking and storytelling. Stance-taking and storytelling have been shown to co-occur often (e.g.Siromaa, 2012), and this is especially the case in reading group talk, a discursive environment in which speakers are engaged in the joint enterprise of assessing the meaning and quality of a shared object: a written narrative text (e.g. a novel). Insights from conversation analysis and dialogic syntax are used to analyse interactional data from several reading group meetings, with a focus on the types of storytelling that are found in this talk, the relationship between the various stories told in sequence in the talk – including the relationship between the written narrative text and the spoken narratives, and the ways in which stance-taking and storytelling are intertwined.