Storytelling into Understanding
THE STUDY
The Stories
In the systemic functional tradition, all texts, spoken or written, are “social activity” types (Eggins, 1994, p.105) constructed by their authors. They represent choices made, consciously or unconsciously, from the vast array of possibilities offered by the language in which they are expressed and the contexts of culture and ideology in which they arise. Systemic procedures for analyzing text, which I have adopted in part (see Eggins & Slade, 1994), consist initially of asking what is interesting about texts that contrast with one another, then developing analytic techniques to specify the nature of the contrast. The linguist Halliday says, further, that the systemic analyst seeks out those features of a text which have “prominence that is motivated”—features that contribute to the total meaning of the text (1973, pp. 112-113).
For the core of my analysis, I focused on the stories in Eve’s and Lizabeth’s Study Group talk with the highest degree of motivated prominence. These were non-obligatory stories—texts that were spontaneously offered rather than told in response to the questions or comments of other participants—about personal involvement in teaching, either hypothetical or real. Especially salient in the stories that qualified for analysis were features of field, or the “actions, relations, participants and circumstances” entailed by the story (Eggins, 1994, p. 220).
