Macrostructure Essay

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Focusing attention on the elements of macrostructure of narrative production may best minimize the paradoxical disparity between speakers of AAE and African American narrative styles with the formal style of narrativization (Champion, 2003; Labov, 1972). Macrostructure refers to the general organization of the narrative with respect to themes, topic maintenance and thematic coherence (Glosser & Deser, 1992). Macrostructure encompasses all elements of microstructure, including story length in words, phrases and sentences; lexical diversity, and thematic cohesion (Glosser & Deser, 1992; Justice, et al., 2006). Ulatowska and Chapman (1994) noted that quantitity and distribution of information can be useful in the assessment of African American narrative …show more content…

Quantity of information refers to the amount of information provided by the speaker and have been measured in terms of duration of the narrative, length of the narrative, number of words, and number and length of utterances (e.g., Ulatowska & Chapman, 1994). Gender differences have been observed in the quantity of information produced in narrativization, however, previous research present inconsistent results, despite the stereotype that women are more verbose than men (Gray, 1992). For example, Schulkind, Schoppel and Scheiderer (2012) found that women produced significantly longer narratives than men. Although no gender difference was found in the amount of T-units produced (i.e., idea units or propositions) per narrative, they observed that women produced significantly longer T-units than men. Similarly, Mulac and Lundell (1986) found that women were wordier than men with respect to mean sentence length. In contrast, Dovidio, Brown, Heltman, Ellyson and Keating (1988) found that men used more words, overall, in their discourse and with more conversational turns. Likewise, Coates (1986) noted that males were more verbose than females in their discourse, particularly as they

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