ABSTRACT
We live in discourse as fish live in water. Lodge, 2008
Story telling is a primary act of mind. Hardy, 1977
As a speech-language pathologist and teacher in the area of language assessment and language disorders, I became increasingly interested in the importance of the narrative in our lives. I saw typically developing language users express their thoughts as they entered different stages of their language development, progressing from single words to sentences, and finally to narratives where they talked about a funny incident, a party, a problem, and created stories. Here was the narrative as a window into the organization and strength of the child’s language system and mind. However, I primarily saw children who were having difficulty achieving this important narrative skill, and needing treatment to obtain it. Then I had the exciting experience of researching narratives in a culture quite different from the mainstream American culture in which I had lived all my life. I compared the narratives of rural American children with those of Bhutanese children. This was an opportunity to analyze the commonalities and differences in children’s storytelling development. What was similar and what was different? Did our Western constructs of storytelling hold up in a culture that only recently had opened itself up to Western civilization? Collecting and analyzing narratives has become for me a fascinating means by which to view the child’s language development, the values and concepts of his or her culture, and, consequently, the child’s mind.
