Genre preferences in the narratives of younger school children Cover Image

Žánrová preference v narativech dětí mladšího školního věku
Genre preferences in the narratives of younger school children

Author(s): Silvie Cinková, Anežka Náhlíková
Subject(s): Stylistics
Published by: AV ČR - Akademie věd České republiky - Ústav pro jazyk český
Keywords: narrative; interpretive sociocultural approach; family genre; heroic-agonistic genre; younger school-aged children

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, we present an analysis of hypothesized sex-specific genre preferences in spontaneous narratives in a corpus of 286 transcribed recordings of younger school children (aged 6–11). We draw upon Nicolopoulou’s conception of narratives as a symbolic activity with sex-specific tendencies: girls prefer the “family” genre and boys prefer the “heroic-agonistic” one. We operationalized Nikolopoulou’s genre classification into 10 thematic narrative features and annotated their respective presence or absence in each narrative. The application of a combination of statistical methods to our sample revealed that the sex-correlated narrative preferences are so weak that they have no implications, e.g. for school practice. The most prominent result, in fact, even counters the a priori assumption of sex-based narrative preferences: no matter what sex or age, children show a strong preference for “mutual aid and cooperation”

  • Issue Year: 80/2019
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 192-214
  • Page Count: 23
  • Language: Czech