Labov and Waletzky's (1976, henceforth L&W) narrative analysis scheme gave a prominent place to evaluation as a component of first person narratives and to its function in establishing the meaning of the narrative for the narrator. Subsequent discussion has placed similar emphasis on this aspect of narrative. For example, Bruner (1986) points out the significance of the "landscape of consciousness" as the definitive characteristic of narrative, taking it beyond the "landscape of action", the complicating action that L&W viewed as defining. In this commentary, we discuss the nature of evaluation as a sense-making function.

We consider L&W's stated and implied claims about evaluation:

1) evaluation is an isolatable component of narrative discourse, in particular distinguished from referential meaning; 2) evaluation serves an interpretive function, signaling the meaning of the narrative for the narrator; in so doing; 3) evaluation is social because it offers the listener information about the narrator's point of view. More implicitly, 4) evaluation is overtly stated;

5) as " a component" it is unitary, whole, and 6) as a discrete linguistic component, evaluation would develop in a linear progression like syntax and other semantic aspects of language. Based on our research and research by others, we argue for expanding this useful characterization of narrative evaluation. Our analysis of the interaction between structural and sense-making aspects of narrative evaluation suggests that evaluation can serve children as they situate themselves within society, a process that is entwined with the development of narrative discourse.

L&W contributed to transform linguistic theory into a theory of discourse by distinguishing between the evaluative and referential meaning of narratives. Without much fanfare, L&W stated, moreover, that evaluation is social as narrators respond to external situations, stimuli, and audiences. By examining the development of young children's oral narratives in home/family contexts and older children's oral and written narratives in school, we have observed that evaluation is iterative; it appears in the narratives of very young children, apparently disappears, and then reappears later in development. This complex history indicates, moreover, that evaluation is an aspect of children's developing awareness of self in relation to society.

Making sense of the world is a major cognitive challenge for children of all ages, essential to meeting basic physical, emotional, and social needs and desires. From the child's perspective, making sense involves figuring out, "What is going on here?" and predicting "what will happen next?", as such awareness is important to the well-being of all children and even the survival of children in harsh environments. Understanding events in the environment is also relational, motivating the child's question, "Where do I fit?" These orienting cognitive questions embed notions about the important people who influence events in the child's world and about the motivations and intentions of these people, but, since those people and their actions are not abstract, the child must infuse the world as given with personal meaning and an increasing awareness of self as intentional, valuable, and connected to persons and events in her environment.

Discourse experiences provide answers to questions about "what is going on here?" and "how do I fit?" in the form of scripts for familiar routinized activities -- the skeletal general action sequences that compose events. The script for an event represents the way things "should be" and the way children, taking their direction from adult, come to expect them to be. Thus, scripts incorporate the ways of culture.

Scripts -- for getting dressed, having a bath, taking an afternoon walk, or eating lunch -- are the stripped down referential core of personal narratives, as Labov and Waletzky conceived them. They are also the developmental starting point of stories. In Bruner's (1990) terms, scripts constitute the "canonical events" against which the unexpected component poses a problem and introduces feeling and thinking (intentionality or meaning) that is the heart of narrative. Scripts, representing what happens in general, do not require an internal evaluative component. Stories, however, whether fictional or personal narratives, need a point of view that incorporates an evaluative component implicitly or explicitly. What happened was triumphant or tragic, surprising, gratifying, or disappointing.

There appear to be two important characteristics that differentiate stories from scripts: stories individuate the general script by way of the specific non-canonical unexpected happening, and stories evaluate the happenings within the narrative from the point of view of the narrator. An intriguing hypothesis is that scripts, which are predictable, cultural frames, provide a context in which children learn to individuate and then to evaluate as they narrativize experiences. Consider as a first case the following bedtime narrative by a 23-month old child (Nelson, 1989).

This typical bedtime monologue by Emily after she was left alone is an example of an individuated variation on everyday routine scripts. Emily recounts a unique one-time occurrence of a scripted event, but there is no overt, and little evidence of covert evaluation. In contrast,

consider a production by Emily, again alone at bedtime from 9 months later at 34 months:

Here the evaluative component is fully integrated into the personal account. Although the bedtime account was individuated from a familiar script, the later story narrative was both individuated and evaluated. The specificity of the event is made clear in the temporality of time and temporal-causal evaluation. However, the evaluation is not brought out as an explicit separate component, but remains implicit in the tone of the recitation. The canonical action is violated but no point of view was stated explicitly that could provide an evaluation. The narration appears to assume that the listener shares a perspective on the action, that the teller and hearer will make the same sense of it. Although not apparently evaluated, this elaborated "new baby" script does carry an emerging perspective in the use of internal state verbs with individual as well as collective first person pronouns and attributions of order and causal relations.

A further step in this story progression is to take a point of view by recounting a relatively novel story with more explicit evaluative marking. Consider the following example from a boy not yet 5 years old (Applebee, 1978).

In this example, the child has moved beyond the script to make a fictional story with overt evaluative component (underlined), expressing his point of view through his characterization of the main character (e.g. doggy was pretty silly). It may be that mastering the cultural genre of story makes the distinctiveness of individuation and evaluation more salient to the child, perhaps providing the basis for further development of both personal narrative and fictional story genres. We present this transition from scripts to stories as a social process in terms of how children use evaluation as a means of communication, as Labov and Waletzky proposed, and argue that, in addition, evaluation serves as a context for development of self through the interpretive force of explicitly-stated evaluation.

Next, we explore the relationship between scripts and stories as a site for the development of self concept as children engage in narrative writing.

Stories to scripts: From self to multiple cultures

Considering the use of evaluation in older children reveals that the relationship of script-to-story is iterative. As children engage in new cultures, in particular the culture of school, we see the script-to-story progression repeat. Older children, who have already been socialized to the routines and language of their primary cultures, come to know and to enact secondary cultures as they use new rhetorical scripts, also referred to as genres. We have observed that as children master the discourse frames of new genres, their use of explicit evaluation is minimal within that genre, but they eventually express a point of view as they make the genre their own. Evaluation is thus situated rather than absolute. Even after children have acquired the ability to use evaluative devices, there are situations when they may not. We have observed a number of situations where apparent reduction of interpretation in the form of explicit use of evaluation devices is replaced by interpretation of a different, more implicit kind -- evaluation that we are calling "cultural" because it involves interpreting the discourse context and selecting the appropriate scripts for self expression.

Several texts by Shara, an 8-year old writing a series of articles for the class news paper illustrate this process (Daiute & Griffin, 1993). When responding to the assignment "Write about what happened when third graders [...] visited the Gardner Museum, and why that was important," Shara offered a text that was her own story of the class trip. She began her story with the classic "who, what, when, where sentence," often taught in relation to journalistic narrative form: About one mouth ago the third and fouth graders went on a field trip to the gardner museeeum. Shara then offered an associatively related set of events with a myriad of evaluative details, as in these few sentences excerpted from the longer narrative: When they got there they saw a lot of broken stauchus. we saw a lot of pichers from famus artist.then are guild gave the tore it was a little bit spcooky because the spirt of miss gardner was on the fouth floor in her will she said that she did not want nobody to go on the fouth floor.we explored the museum there was a piucher called the rape of eropy.It was about a god who trured him selve in to a nice bull because if is wife saw him he would and on the roof there was a big piucher of all the gods. Also reflecting her own point of view, Shara ended by reporting on her own personal experience after the class trip.

This example illustrates how Shara presented a canonical school event and related rhetorical script -- the class trip report -- from her own point of view. Shara expressed a point of view through evaluation with qualifying adjectives; internal states; reported speech; causal connections; and intensifiers (selected examples underlined). In addition to specific linguistic devices, Shara offered her perspective on the significance to the events by her use of the personal coda at the end, implying perhaps that Robin's mother fixing her walkman was what was really important about the day. Although evaluation (like spelling, punctuation, and syntax) does not appear to be completely controlled by this young author, the narrative is infused with her point of view and thus more storied than script-like. Nevertheless, Shara faced eventual pressure to move away from this personal style of evaluation.

The progression from evaluated story to referential script is evident in an example written several weeks after Shara's museum report -- after Shara had worked with her teacher one-on-one several times. The assignment for the next text was to write about the day in Renaissance Italy (which the class had been studying intensively) when the new doors of the baptistery of Saint Mary of the Flower in Florence were unveiled.

This text is more like a script, in its straightforward temporal action sequence (in bold) and the paucity of evaluation around these happenings. Notably missing also is the personal coda that Shara had previously used to end many of her texts. As the school year progressed, Shara integrated explicit, personal evaluation with the school narrative script, elaborating upon the bare action sequence script by gradually infusing it with some of the types of evaluation she had used in her earlier storied texts.

This idea that the script-to-story progression repeats embeds the understanding that scripts are cultural constructions; they are not neutral. Scripts implicitly embed beliefs, values, and expectations of the culture. Accounting for cultural points of view in discourse framing is a metalinguistic process and thus may be implicit, whereas personal styles as in stories appear to be marked more explicitly. Of course, cultural discourse practices also shape the nature of specific linguistic devices, but choosing among rhetorical frames, as in Shara's case, involves cultural sense-making. As children mature and engage in diverse contexts, they are required and become able to select among diverse ways of situating and shaping their discourse. While evaluation may not be explicit in the first phases of older children's use of new rhetorical scripts, children bring to bear an interpretive process all the same. Selecting which rhetorical script to use as the options increase from home scripts to school scripts involves making sense of the discourse context, purpose, audience, and one's own point of view within this cultural complex -- interpretive activities within the landscape of consciousness.

This simultaneous dropping of personal evaluation and adopting a new cultural script suggests, we argue, that evaluation functions in at least two ways, representing competing orientations of self/society relationships as constituted in competing interpretive modes. Thus, from early on, evaluation comes into the child's repertoire as a linguistic component available for distinguishing me from not-me. Using different kinds of evaluation later on involves making choices between different kinds of me -- as for Shara between the good student me and the personally-meaningful me. The role of social interaction in this process of change is integral to the development of evaluation. Cultural and personal evaluation styles together constitute a broader characterization of evaluation as an interpretive function, and further investigation of this relationship would be useful in expanding narrative theory and implications of that theory for educational practice.

How do children develop this complex interpretive orientation involving metalinguistic knowledge about interpretive orientations as well as a set of linguistic devices? We propose that the iterative process of script-to-story-to-script involves the construction and interplay of society/self relationships with linguistic and structural features of evaluation. In this sense, the complex evaluative function constitutes human development rather than being simply a distinct linguistic component.

Insights into this development come from the observation that scripts are individual representations of experience, albeit of canonical culturally- and socially-shared events and/or discourse genres. Enacted scripts are represented from the child's perspective only. Scripts are thus not dialogic --they are not ordinarily the topic of conversation. Only when children and parents begin talking about memories of personal experiences does the dialogic and thus the evaluative point of view enter. In early cases, this evaluative stance is introduced by an adult, as in the following example of a dialogue between a 2-year old boy and his mother who were asked to talk about their shared past with family photos on hand as prompts (Engel, 1986):

C: Mommy, the Chrysler building. [...]

M: Yeah, who works in the Chrysler building?

C: Daddy

M: Do you ever go there? [...]

C: We went to ... my Daddy went to work

M: Remember when we went to visit Daddy? Went in the elevator, way way up in the building so we could look down from the big window?

C: big window . M: mmhm

C: ( ) When ... we did go on the big building

M: mmhm, the big building. Was that fun? Would you like to do it again? Sometime.

C: I want to go on the big building.

This excerpt illustrates how the mother's questions guide her child in stating a point of view, as they describe their memory of a scene and comment on it. This and similar examples provide support for the assumption that evaluation of "what happened" emerges between people, as a point of view comes into focus. Notice also, how the mother elicits, in particular, the child's feelings as she teaches him to reminisce and to think about his future in terms of past experience.

The dynamic between the interpretive frame of the school-based narrative and the child's personal evaluation is played out in the following interaction between Shara and her teacher as they wrote an entry for the class newspaper together, reporting on the day that Danny, one of the boys in the class, broke his leg. This example illustrates the teacher's attempts to socialize her students to writing the types of narratives that are expected in school -- narratives with detailed, factual event sequences organized into structures like paragraphs.

Now, how do you do that when you're writing your own papers?

Like parents, teachers help children realize their views are particular, but the dialogue often revolves around aspects of subject matter or genre features that children are expected to master rather than about their feelings and desires. Minority students like the African-American Shara often use multiple discourses, without the explicit acknowledgment that they are, to some extent, working in a second language/dialect. There are many issues related to the value, ethics, and need for such socialization, but for the purposes of this paper, we offer this example to illustrate how scripts and stories -- cultural and personal forms of evaluation -- interplay with social interaction context. If the child's world is one that allows for elaboration within different cultural scripts, he or she will not only learn to differentiate a personal point of view within the culture but will also become increasingly skilled at enacting and discussing diverse points of view. As young children begin to challenge familiar scripts at home, older children can learn to do so in school and in the community. Diverse cultural scripts and discourse genres can then become the topic of conversation, given mutual trust to engage in discussion around the diversity. Thus, point of view is also made problematic as choices about discourse forms and contexts occur in school and also in peer culture as children begin to shape their own identities rather than step into them as prepared by the adults in their culture.

In summary, we have argued that to describe the evaluative function as sense-making requires more than characterizing it as a component. In context, evaluation emerges as points of view on an event come into contact in dialogic contexts. In school, children learn to adopt the script-like impersonal frame, and if they have the opportunity to exchange points of view in open and reflective ways, they can infuse diverse cultural scripts with their own personal evaluation.

Through this argument, we propose the following extensions to L&W's original characterization of evaluation. Evaluation is more complex than originally characterized in the following ways: 1) embedded in the social world of discourse, evaluation involves cultural and personal aspects of sense-making; 2) as cultural sense-making, evaluation occurs implicitly to frame narrative discourse in the form of scripts, whereas personal evaluation is more explicit and internal to a particular text ; 3) the development of evaluation involves an iterative process (rather than a linear progression), as a context in which children explore relationships between self and society as well as developing particular types of linguistic expertise; 4) evaluation is varied and situated rather than absolute or unitary, even though some types of evaluation may be explicit and isolatable within a given text.

These ideas suggest continued theory and research, building upon Labov & Waletzky's original claims, to understand further how children become increasingly engaged with language as an interpretive medium and how their work with discourse engages them in the development of self within community.

Applebee, A. (1978). The child's concept of story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Daiute, C., & Griffin, T.M. (1993). The social construction of narrative. In C. Daiute (Ed.), The development of literacy through social interaction. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Engel, S. (1986). Learning to reminisce: A developmental study of how young children talk about the past. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York Graduate Center.

Gruendel, N.M. (1980). Scripts and stories: A study of children's event narratives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University.

Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts (pp. 12-44). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

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Source: Oral Versions of Personal Experience: Three Decades of Narrative Analysis. A special Volume of Journal of Narrative and Life History, vol. 7, 1997, 207-215 (edited by Michael G.W. Bamberg).