Volume 25, Issue 3

The analyses offered in this paper attempt to elucidate some of the complex strategies that very young children use to assert power in socio-narrative activity. The paper focuses on three child storytellers in one preschool classroom who recruited verbal, visual, gestural, actional, and narrative mediating elements to carry out multimodal discourses. The children’s spontaneous narratives made use of various combinations of color, size and placement of drawings, as well as segmental and suprasegmental language features, written language, gesture, and silence. These elements carried out each narrator’s moment-to-moment design of the discourse by working in service of a switch-off between signs via the various narrative elements of the fictions that the children were creating. Simultaneously, the children played out real-world social relationships through these fictional narratives in successive attempts to invade—or at least touch—corners of each other’s realities. The analysis includes a textual component as well as visual representations that relate the exemplified interactions to the discourses of which they are part. These interactions and discourses are also linked with the notion of macro-narrative and the role of less visible mediating elements drawn from the history of the child’s relationships.

The author analyzes how participants of Seventh-Day Adventist Bible study describe their experience as similar to that of the characters of the Bible stories they are reading. In conversation analytical studies of second stories, it has been shown how the teller of the second story achieves a similarity between her/his experience and that described in the first story. In Bible study, similarity of experiences is also achieved, but the situation is more complex, since similarity must be achieved with a written story. The article shows how the Bible study participants first work with the Bible story so as to find something that can be applied to their own lives. Then the teacher of the Bible study asks a question about the experiences of the participants on the basis of this work. The respondents then describe similar experiences to those in the Bible story. The experiences they describe are categorical, shareable religious experiences. The teachers comment on the answers and display their orientation to and evaluate the shareability of the experiences. The methodology is based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis, and the data consists of audio-taped Bible study interactions in two Seventh-Day Adventist churches in Finland.

This study deals with special discourse strategies used to lead Jewish mass audiences to repent and return to the faith. The characteristic shared by all these audiences is their desire to embrace religious observance. The function of the speaker is to encourage them to do just that. The examples presented in this article were taken from live appearances made by Rabbi Amnon Itzhak, one of the most famous maxzirim bitshuva (the Jewish equivalent of revivalist preachers) in Israel. The preacher is familiar with the cultural background of his audience, and he skillfully wields this knowledge when choosing his rhetorical means of persuasion. By doing so, he adapts himself not only to the audience, but also to other persons or entities—especially the media—and tries to convince them of his view. One of his strategies is presenting quasi-scientifi;c arguments as facts that seemingly lead to unequivocal conclusions. An additional technique is denying the legitimacy of explanations given to the same phenomena by scientists and secular people. In order to reinforce his arguments, Rabbi Itzhak ridicules those representing an opposing viewpoint. Among other linguistic means, he makes intensive use of word plays and prosodic devices, namely special intonation and stress, rhyme, and alliteration.

Socioliteracy, meaning concern with practices, genre, and ideologies, has arguably displaced decoding orthographic writing in the mainstream of literacy theory and research. However, this shift has engendered disagreements about the meaning of literacy itself. Whereas some theorists take the Multiliteracies view that all forms of communication can be considered literacy, others require involvement of written language or, alternatively, education-dependent genres. The present study supports the Multiliteracies definition by exploring an oral vernacular genre, the rap cipher —improvised round-robin rhyming— which fails both proposed delimiting criteria, as literacy. The study explores a young inner-city rap crew’s ciphers using the kind of ethnography and genre analysis typical of socioliteracy research. It finds that the practices and forms of the ciphers are tightly bound up with their creators’ ideologies and that when holders of incompatible ideologies interact in rap, generic confliict results. Since such findings directly parallel those of numerous literacy studies of written and educational forms, they suggest that similar processes occur across modalities and domains. This conclusion suggests that it may be useful to conceptualize literacy as a particular perspective on communicative forms rather than as an inherent quality of certain forms.