Pedagogic Literary Narration in theory and action

Abstract

Shared reading is an international convention of literary study where students have powerful formative encounters with narratives, shaping attitudes to the novel form and to reading. While narratology theorises narration in texts and speech, we lack an empirical account of teachers' narrative work around study texts purposed to literary study goals. This article introduces the term Pedagogic Literary Narration (PLN) to conceptualise teachers' exposition around narrative prose and its relationship with students' talk. Methodology adapts Conversation Analysis to account for the introduction of quoted text to literary study interaction, embedding Bruner's explorations of narrative meaning and Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. Elaborating transcript data, discussion outlines the constituent practices of a distinctive pedagogy built around interplay of text and teacher narrations. PLN extends Rosenblatt's seminal conceptualisation of reading transactions according to aesthetic and efferent stances. Findings identify teachers' complex, highly efficient and specialised exposition where unique new narrations derive from dual purposes to a) present text narratives and b) orient to them for literary analysis. PLN gives literary study a theoretical framework to assert its specialist pedagogy and enrich students' encounters with narrative prose.