Story Appreciation in Conversations-For-Learning: Stories and Gestalt-Contextures

Abstract

This chapter recommends a gestalt-contexture approach to stories in conversation. The gestalt-contexture approach advocates for a more holistic view of context, through analyses that account for both sequential and membership categorisation aspects of stories in interactions. This approach is sensitive to aspects of storytelling sequences (e.g. story prefaces, story appreciations, story completions, second stories) according to the contexts of their production, such as conversation-for-learning, in which participants' interactional competence is more variable. The chapter examines longitudinal conversation data between two adolescent Korean boys and an American graduate student who was meeting them to help them practice their English. The open-ended nature of the conversation-for-learning made finding and launching a mutually orientable topic a constant and mandatory task for the participants. While preliminary analyses identified "crazy things we did as a kid" as a prevalent theme in stories, the relevance of stories to this theme is not always self-evident but takes interactional work to establish. The study demonstrates 1) orientation to membership categorisation is sequentially operative in generating topics in conversation, 2) story appreciation points are collaboratively produced by tellers and recipients, 3) story appreciations are ongoing, permeable, and not limited to story completion.