A RTICLE Language and Literature Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 12(2): 153–174 [0963–9470 (200305) 12:2; 153–174; 032297] Collaborative oral narratives of general experience: when an interview becomes a conversation Marina Lambrou, University of East London, UK Abstract This article explores the shift in speech genre from a peer group interview speech event to an activity type with interactive features resembling a casual conversation and the consequent effects on the narrator, interviewees and process of story-telling. It reports on sociolinguistic interviews in which collection of oral narratives of personal experience among members of the Greek Cypriot community in London becomes collaborative and facilitates the co-production of spoken personal narratives (hence the ‘general experience’ of the title). The highly social act of narrating sees the emergence of explicit and implicit collaborative strategies, specifically the use of prompts and requests for clarification, which appear to be an inevitable outcome of narrating in a setting where the audience is wider than just the interviewer. Keywords: activity type; collaborative story-telling; interview; oral narratives; prompt; request for clarification; speech event 1 Introduction There is no doubt that Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) (henceforth L&W) and Labov’s (1972) groundbreaking methods for collecting spoken natural narratives remain as valid and applicable today as when they first undertook their research (see Bamberg, 1997). The same can also be said for the functional description of these spoken narratives, which is widely viewed as providing a universal narrative framework. One area of L&W’s data that received little attention within the wider context of group discourse, however, was an examination of the interviewer–interviewee dynamic and whether changes in this dynamic affected the production of narratives in peer groups. The issue is raised here in the light of analysis of personal spoken narratives from members of the London-based Greek Cypriot community (LGC). Close examination of personal narratives from the LGC community shows evidence of distinct linguistic patterns across peer group interviews that appear to be the result of changes in the group dynamic. Specifically, peer group members adopt what I call collaborative story-telling strategies, categorized according to the function they fulfil within the interview, despite the constraints of the conventional interview setting. Moreover, the emergence of collaborative story- telling in peer groups causes a significant genre shift in the interview speech event to an ‘activity type’ (Levinson, 1979) where conversational narratives emerge as the main type of discourse. Such findings will provide a greater understanding of at Kingston University on May 5, 2016 lal.sagepub.com Downloaded from