- 359 - In Aqeel’s retelling, 40 percent of the clauses are coded for expressive phonology, but this is
more indicative of an appropriate use of phonological features than a performance style as such. He has a total of thirty-one internal evaluation devices coded 1.15 per clause, twenty-
six of which are intensifiers. 59 percent of all clauses are evaluated and there are six instances of direct speech 22 percent of all clauses. There are four clear breaks in continuity, some of
the details are muddled, and there are a few cases of unclear pronominal reference. So in looking at the dichotomy retelling versus performance we have, in effect, answered a
question, posed in chapter 3, as to what makes a good story, and given one reason why a particular story may be judged to be “better”, or more pleasurable and meaningful to the
hearers, than others in the set. However, we will be looking for other factors which make a good story when we specifically focus on Labov’s model in our final section.
8.1.3 The Relationship between Story Structure and Story Content
In chapter 2, pages 25–29, we were looking briefly at Story Grammars and noting that they represented a picture of story content, rather than story structure, and so were not particularly
useful to us as a tool for the analysis of production data. However, we did suggest that at some stage it was relevant to question how well these surface discourse manifestations
actually convey the story content. The content of Aqeel’s Story B2 is displayed on page 28. It has three episodes, with Episodes 1 and 2 causally connected by ending-embedding, and
also Episodes 2 and 3. We can see from figure 2.7 that missing elements include a “goal” for Episode 2 and a “complex reaction” for Episode 3, and there are some misplaced
segments in the outcome of the final episode. A similar display for Shvinder’s Story B would reveal that Shvinder’s version yields almost the same tree-structure as the original,
but lacks a “complex reaction” for Episode 3 and an “ending” for Episode 2. So, content- wise, Shvinder’s version is, as we would expect, more complex than Aqeel’s, but both
versions have two unfilled nodes which indicate missing elements, and thus result in “violations of ideal story structure” and a story not considered to be well-formed. But, as
Peterson and McCabe 1983 point out: A good narrative in terms of episodic analysis is not necessarily a good narrative in terms
of high point analysis, and vice versa. p. 172 They focus on different aspects of a narrative, the former [high point analysis] on personal
significance and the latter [episodic analysis] on cognitive problem-solving. Thus, they represent the structure of narratives quite differently. p. 174
- 360 - Therefore, we can see that both types of analysis are inadequate to represent “what
children are doing when they tell narratives, i.e. how they are structuring their tales” p. 186, and so a direct comparison of models does not get us very far in answering the
question we raised above. Nevertheless, as a broad generalization, we can say that those narratives which are more “complete” as far as story content is concerned also seem to
have a better surface structure in terms of length, evaluation, the amount of subordination they contain, and their overall plot structure, and are, therefore, better able to convey the
story content clearly.
8.2 Evaluation as an Indicator of L2 Development
