Quico’s story: An ethnopoetic analysis of a Gypsy boy’s narratives at school

This article examines a narrative told by Quico, a five-year-old Gypsy child, in a Spanish kindergarten classroom. The guiding framework stems from ethnopoetics and performance-oriented narrative analysis. First, a stanza analysis of the narrative is presented. Structurally the narrative can be described as topic associative in the sense discussed by SarahMichaels (1981, 1991). The text is organized around a set of recurrent markers and rhetorical devices such as aluego ‘later’ or dramatized direct speech. In content, the story deals with events in his family and his role as agent in these routines. Second, the child’s telling is resituated and examined in its interactional context. Contrary to previous studies, despite clear differences between Quico’s discourse style and the speech patterns of the rest of the children, his tellings were well received and managed by the teacher and the rest of the class. This outcome is related to the general goals set by the teacher for this speech event and to her experience with Gypsy students and provides a new analytical case that can be incorporated into the home–school mismatch framework.