Shaping meanings through genre

An analysis of a personal experience narrative in a graduate course

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate oral narratives of personal experience told in the graduate classroom and viewed here as a genre (Martin & Rose, 2007). Narratives of personal experience are ubiquitous in everyday life and work as a means of re-constructing experience (Bruner, 1997, 1994). In this research, narratives of personal experience are examined according to narrative and evaluation theory (Cortazzi & Jin, 2001; Martin, 2001; Martin & White, 2005) to investigate how evaluation occurs in these texts and how they work as a pedagogic tool. Through the analysis of this genre, a direct connection between narratives of personal experience and the social construction of knowledge can be highlighted.