Gender, ethnicity, and narrative : a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of adolescents' personal experience stories

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine how a select group of adolescents constructs written stories about personal experience, how they make use of the syntactic resources of English to encode information in narrative, and how they depict themselves and their worlds. To that end, I have examined eighty personal experience stories written by fourteen- to sixteen year-olds at both discourse and syntactic levels. I have also examined gender and ethnicity as influences that affect both the structure and theme of these adolescents' stories. I analyzed eighty written personal experience stories, twenty each from black and white boys and girls in junior high and high schools in a mid-sized Central Texas school district. The students were asked to write an in-class, first-draft response-to the prompt, 'tell a story about a frightening experience you have had.' Using models established by linguists, rhetoricians, and psychologists, I examined the stories to answer the following questions: (1) how do these adolescents structure their stories; (2) what clause types do they use to encode story components; and (3) how does gender and ethnicity influence the depiction of self, others, and the world in these adolescents' stories? Findings suggest the following: (1) contrary to claims made in previous research, this group of adolescents constructs fully formed narratives; (2) black and white students, girls and boys alike, encode essential narrative components in a variety of complex syntactic structures, though the girls' stories tend to include more clauses than the boys, and the black boys' stories tend to be short and unelaborated; (3) the black and white girls alike create storyworlds of caring and connection; (4) gender and ethnicity strongly influence the worlds created by these boys, where autonomy and celebration of masculine attributes characterize the world of the white boys, and connectedness and diversity characterize that of the black boys.