OBJECTIVE Studying personal narratives can generate understanding of how people experience physical and mental illness. However, few studies have explored narratives of engagement in health positive behaviours, with none focusing on men specifically. Thus, we sought to examine men's experiences of their efforts to engage in and maintain healthy behaviours, focusing on meditation as an example o...

The role of story and narrative within games has been debated at length. By taking the approach that narrative can be understood with games, but only by incorporating the dynamics of game play and by accepting that existing models of narrative must be modified, this paper examines the place of narrative within role-playing games. Narrative can be defined as a description of a series of events. ...

We describe an ongoing collaboration with the District Six Museum, in Cape Town, aimed at designing a storytelling prototype for preserving personal experience narratives. We detail the design of an interactive virtual environment (VE) which was inspired by a three month ethnography of real-life oral storytelling. The VE places the user as an audience member in a virtual group listening to two ...

This is an account of personal narratives shared by several people with dyslexia. Most of these are presented in their original quotation format to provide personal accounts of the lives of people with dyslexia. In this paper the author shares her conversations with her participants. This paper provides an original conceptual model, which is currently been tested empirically. Dyslexia affects t...

Narrative features of the life stories of child abuse survivors and nonvictimized respondents were compared. Particular emphasis was placed on relatively "objective" features, given that the content of the narrative typically precluded blind coding. The research focused on both the relative emphasis on the past versus present and future and on the self versus others in respondents' stories. The...

In the past decade, language memoirs, linguistic autobiographies, and learners’ journals and diaries have become a popular means of data collection in applied linguistics. It is not always clear however how one should go about analyzing these data. The aim of this paper is to offer a critical review of analytical frameworks applied to second language users’ personal narratives. I discuss the st...

This essay examines personal narratives and gender-sensitive fictional representations of the Partition between India and Pakistan to contribute to a counterhistory that takes centrally into account the ways in which nation formation was written on the bodies of women. The juxtaposition of my mother’s stories, the oral histories gathered by feminist historiographers, and critical analyses of Pa...

PURPOSE Personal narratives are common in children's conversations, recommended as the appropriate genre for early writing by educators, and part of many high-stakes tests, possibly because they tend to be better formed than fictional narratives. However, current practice in the field of speech-language pathology employs fictional narratives in assessment, intervention, and study of children wi...

In the frontier among Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay oral narratives transpose political limits. On circulating in this region, narratives reveal identities, traditions and even feelings. In these countries the practice of storytelling is a central aspect of a "culture of frontier", it is fundamental for transmitting values and knowledge. In this paper I present an specific aspect of this cultur...