“…We also find four main conceptions of narrative, which serve as points of reference for the practice of narrative inquiry in applied linguistics: - The canonical story as described, for example, by Labov (1972): an account of experience consisting of an abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, and coda
- Life histories and autobiographies, or, in the context of research on narrative identity, the ways in which people make sense of their lives through the activity of storytelling (e.g., Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001)
- Grand narratives (Lyotard, 1984) or the larger, culturewide ideologies that shape the themes and discourse of particular narratives (Tannen, 2008)
- Narratives-in-interaction or more fragmentary accounts of experience in everyday talk, often called small stories (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008)
Because narrative inquiry in applied linguistics works with a range of narrative texts, its coherence as a field of inquiry lies less in its concern with particular text-types and more in its focus on the activity of storytelling. As Pomerantz and Kearney (2012) put it, applications of narrative theory in applied linguistics are wide ranging, but they “share a similar philosophical foundation by appealing to the primordial meaning-making functions of narrative” (p. 224). Making a similar point, Barkhuizen (2013) used the term “narrative knowledging” (p. 4) to denote “making sense of an experience through narrating, analyzing narratives, reporting narrative research, and consuming research findings” (p. 4).…”