Some of Gee’s Building Tasks in Oral Narratives and Speech
Discourse analysts often analyze oral narratives, because they are the “saying” of Gee’s
definition of language as “saying, doing, and being.” I am particularly interested in spoken
language, because of my future career as a speech pathologist. I am very interested in narratives
because being able to tell a simple narrative is a skill that children should begin to develop by
age two, and the ability to process narratives is a skill that is often absent in people with
cognitive impairments. There are a variety of ways to analyze oral narratives in discourse
analysis, and all of Gee’s building tasks can be analyzed in oral narratives, but I chose to focus
on the building tasks that I could best relate to speech pathology.
One of Gee’s building tasks is significance, which involves drawing the listener’s
attention to certain characters or events. Analysts may ask questions about what strategies the
storyteller uses to foreground and background characters when telling oral narratives. They may
collect grammatical evidence through analyzing choice of names (who gets named and who does
not), and through analyzing who gets to do what (by looking at the sentence structure). This type
of analysis can also take place in text, such as identifying the subject/verb combinations in an
article, which may yield surprising results (in class we found that the word “teachers” was never
the subject in a core curriculum article). They might also be interested in intensifiers, and
identify what adverbs, adjectives, and word choice intensifies the action. These are all strategies
that speakers use in language to make certain things significant or not, and discourse analysts
want to study how language creates significance or lack of significance.
Another topic within the category of oral narratives is Gee’s building task of practices,
specifically the social practice of doing something. Gee says that the actions and associated
identities that are normative in a community are practices. A discourse analyst could ask the
following question: What does the community of the storyteller deem to be normal or
appropriate and how does this affect the language that the storyteller uses? A discourse analyst
might be interested in evidence for traditional (English) grammar designating language as
appropriate and normal.
The ability to tell simple narratives is very difficult for those with language impairments,
because they are unable to sequence events, they get off topic easily, or they do not have the
motor abilities to produce the speech itself. However, this task of practices within oral stories
does not just relate to difficulties my future clients may have; it also relates to how I
communicate. A discourse analyst may be interested in collecting evidence regarding how
someone’s language changes depending on what practice/practices he or she wants to enact. For
example, the practice I will have with fellow colleagues and other professionals, such as doctors,
will be different from the practice I have with my clients and their families. In both situations my
language will be professional, but with other speech pathologists and doctors I will use technical
terminology, whereas with clients and their families I have to explain the technical terminology
using everyday language.
Relating to practices is what Gee says about discourse analysis at the very beginning of
his book – that “saying” comes from doing and being. A discourse analyst may collect evidence
for what constitutes a certain person’s “doing” and “being,” and ask this question: how does
culture shape this person’s being? Or do we shape the sociocultural context by how we say, do,
and be? Because saying comes from doing and being, Gee argues that when you lose “saying,”
you also lose “doing” and “being.” This relates to speech pathology because language deficits
affect the entire person, not just their language abilities; after a left-hemispheric stroke, the
person not only loses speech but also movement on the right side of their body. In addition, when
a person loses the ability to speak, it often affects their personality. A previously social, happy
person may become an introverted, depressed person after suffering from a stroke.
The last building task relating to oral narratives that both discourse analysts and myself as
a future speech pathologist are interested in is sign systems. Discourse analysts may answer the
following questions: What kind of sign system does the speaker value enough to use? What
language or dialect is present? How are people and things named or described in the story? A
discourse analyst might also ask how a piece of language might privilege or “disprivilege”
(Gee’s term) certain dialects or languages over others. They might use the Oakland Resolution as
evidence for the use of language to sustain the claim that Black English/Ebonics is a legitimate
language to be used in schools by African-American children. As a speech pathologist, I will be
working with clients who use a variety of dialects. Although it is common for people to look
down upon language such as Black English because it is “lazy” or “ungrammatical,” I
understand that Black English is its own language because it is rule-governed, and it would be
unethical for me to make a Black English speaker learn Standard English (unless they ask to
learn it because they need to write a paper, interview for a job, etc.).
Oral narratives are largely studied in discourse analysis, and discourse analysts ask
questions to determine how the language the storyteller uses portrays significance, practices, and
sign systems. Each of these building tasks can be analyzed in the context of speech pathology,
because oral language is a large part of speech pathology.