ABSTRACT
Sociological and sociolinguistic views of narrative have been developing since the 1960s but it is only recently that attention to these has been paid in education. The chapter looks at how conversation analysts find interactional patterns in the conversational context of narratives, and Goffman's comments on narratives are summarized, in the context of his dramaturgical model of face-to-face interaction. It examines the Labov's evaluation model of narrative. This model focusses on the internal structure of narrative in a sociolinguistic context. The chapter focuses on emphasis on the social context of narrative, in the work of Wolfson and Polanyi, who link narrative with culture and performance respectively. It specifically examines the interview context as a site for eliciting narratives. The analysis using the Evaluation model can be supplemented with reference to lexical signalling. They examine the semantic relations between clauses in order to study the information structures of texts in terms of writers' and readers' inferences.
