Throwing a light on oral narrative data in order to inform language and literacy research

Narrative methodologies are valuable to language and literacy research. Oral narratives told in situations of face-to-face interaction used research scaffolding pedagogic activities. Nevertheless oral often present limiting cases which narrative accounts less easily distinguishable from other genres such as interrogative, expository, descriptive or argumentative accounts. The resulting confusion around genre has an impact on data selection weighing thereby how is mobilised situations. This paper presents the results a corpus-based statistical investigation into interactional features collected during academic interviews. Common claims made about narratives, that they structurally differentiated, rely more turns at talk unique manner presenting discrete experiences not supported straightforward way corpus data. Narratives do promote involvement, self-reference, complex embeddings constructed dialogue. Conversely frequent, task consistently aligned with their context. In these findings suggest need reflect relationship between types participant response, solicitation allocated response times. study contributes differentiating discourse accurately emphasises particularities interaction. Keywords: interviews, literacy, usage, data, interaction, embedding, genres, alignment