GETTING THE POINT - A NARRATIVE JOURNEY INTO THE ATHABASKAN CULTURE

Narrative assessment is traditionally approached from the linear persp ective of the dominant culture and methods of analysis reflect that bi as. Other cultures, like the Athabaskan culture, organize narrative th inking in a different manner. Few tools are available for the more cri tical understanding of the nonlinear narrative for developmental, clin ical, and educational purposes. Using story recall, this article exami nes the Athabaskan narrative as told by a village storyteller to two n ative students, one of whom has a language-learning disability with a cooccurring mild hearing loss. The original narrative and the retellin gs were studied using underlying structure analysis. The prosodic and structural patterns revealed through the method of assessment were con sistent with the concept of a spatially organized narrative. Clinical implications for applying this approach are described as being more se nsitive to possible interfaces between cultural differences in narrati ve recall and discourse management problems characteristic of a langua ge-learning disability.