Haikuas a discourse regulation device: A stanza analysis of Japanese children's personal narratives

Abstract

Conversational narratives of 17 Japanese children aged 5 to 9 were analyzed using stanza analysis (Gee 1985;Hymes 1982). Three distinctive features emerged: (1) the narratives are exceptionally succinct; (2) they are usually free-standing collections of three experiences; (3) stanzas almost always consist of three lines. These features reflect the basic characteristics of haiku, a commonly practiced literary form that often combines poetry and narrative, and an ancient, but still ubiquitous game called karuta, which also displays three lines of written discourse. These literacy games may explain both the extraordinary regularity of verses per stanza and the smooth acquisition of reading by a culture that practices restricted, ambiguous, oral-style discourse. The structure of Japanese children's narratives must be understood within the larger context of omoiyari "empathy" training of Japanese children. Empathy training may account for the production, comprehension, and appreciation of ambiguous discourse in Japanese society. (Cultural differences in discourse style, the relationship among oral language, literacy, and literature)

Beyond Chronicity: Evaluation and Temporality in Spanish-Speaking Children's Personal Narratives

“…these early productions would have been excluded" (McCabe, 1997b, p. 144). Minami (2001) takes this point further, highlighting that older children and even adults produce appropriate narratives that contain only one event -for example, some Japanese haiku narratives follow a minimalist tradition of storytelling (Minami & McCabe, 1991). Because this is an initial approach toward understanding the narrative performance of a cultural/linguistic group that has not been previously studied, I also opted for a broad definition of personal narrative: an type of connected discourse that provides an account of related events that have been personally experienced (Hudson & Shapiro, 1991).…”

“…These studies highlight the importance of interactional and sociocultural factors in development and warn us against universal standards for assessing narrative performance. These studies have documented, for example, that the topic-chaining discourse style (Michaels, 1981) and parallelism (Cazden, Michaels, & Tabors, 1985;Gee, 1996) of African American children's narratives and the multiepisodic quality of Japanese children's narratives (Minami, 2001;Minami & McCabe, 1991) are appropriate and desirable patterns in these children's speech community.…”

Reflections on the Gestation of Polymorphic Innovation: The Exploitation of Emergence in Social Network Development via Text Messaging

“…On a pan-cultural basis, humanity is said to share the common trait of possessing a "puzzle instinct" (Danesi, 2002), an innate propensity to grapple with problems or enigmas that challenge ingenuity. The puzzle of text messaging is an ongoing challenge to craft miniscule missives, malformed in appearance perhaps, but with cohesive meaning that at times may appear to border on lyrical composition, a kind of digital incarnation of Japanese haiku poetry (Minami & McCabe, 1991) Aarseth (1997, p. 179) defines ergodic communication as that which "in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users." In other words, communication that has an embedded level of difficulty that demands a measured effort to both utilize and understand.…”

Producing culturally appropriate narratives in English as a foreign language

“…With time, children learn to create systematic representations of their experience in socially and culturally appropriate ways through the construction of narratives, and the structural complexity of narratives increases (Botvin & Sutton-Smith, 1977;Haslett, 1986). Cross-cultural studies of oral narratives have revealed a series of contrasts with respect to the presence of specific story structure categories (Labov, 1972), their organization (Minami & McCabe, 1991;Shiro, 1997;Uccelli, 1997), and the type and amount of information included in them, particularly with respect to the inclusion of evaluative devices that describe characters' internal states (Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991;Berman & Slobin, 1994;Kang, 2003;Kuntay & Nakamura, 1993). Studies of L2 oral narratives have focused on the areas of difficulty L2 learners may face in producing extended discourse in the target language.…”