ABSTRACT
Children, like adults, spontaneously repair their utterances in the course of speaking. Star sharers are children in each classroom who shared frequently and willingly, and who were considered good sharers by their peers— as evidenced either by attentiveness at the moment or by comments in interviews. They are making repairs for the listener at the level of organization of thematic content of the narrative as a whole. The children are thinking about the information the listener needs in order to understand part of the story not yet told and making a midstream repair to provide needed orientation. Closely related to this difference in the children's narrative style are differences in teachers' responses. Formally, one potentially important feature is the relationship between verb tense in the host and verb tense in the insert. Contrasting tenses should make it easier for the listener to hear the insert as orienting information rather than as the next segment of narrative action.
