Analyzing Conversation in Children’s Short Stories

Abstract

Conversation analysis has long been the concern of many linguists who work in the field of discourse analysis. In spite of the fact that there are many researches have been done in the field of short stories but up to the researcher knowledge the investigation of the selected short stories has not been studied yet. Hence, this paper aims at answering the following questions: what are the features of children’s short stories language and the differences between short stories of four years old and those of six years old.  Hence, the devices used by the story tellers in reciting the short stories should be observed. Thus, the researcher has consulted the models presented by Johnson and Fillmore (2010) to show tenses and sentence structure, and Smith (2008) for conversation analysis.In the light of the analysis according to Johnson and Fillmore (2010), the researcher has reached to the following results: It is clear that simple sentences and past simple tense are used more than the other devises due to the fact that it is the main features of children’s short stories language. The conversation of children’s short stories has also showed that the language of four years old is somehow similar to those of six years old. According to Smith (2008), it is clear that the language of children is similar to those of short stories then it is similar to those of real life conversation.