SHAPING MEANINGS THROUGH GENRE: An Analysis of a Personal Experience Narrative in a Graduate Course

The purpose of this study is to investigate oral narratives of personal experience told in thegraduate classroom and viewed here as a genre (Martin & Rose, 2007). Narratives of personal experienceare 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 evaluationtheory (Cortazzi & Jin, 2001; Martin, 2001; Martin & White, 2005) to investigate how evaluation occursin these texts and how they work as a pedagogic tool. Through the analysis of this genre, a directconnection between narratives of personal experience and the social construction of knowledge can behighlighted.