Repeat after me
Authors: Darnton Ann 
Published: August 2014

Editors’ introduction

A number of papers in this collection deal with various aspects of repetition in texts. Some (e.g. Hunston, Thompson
& Thompson) look at this from a primarily descriptive angle and are concerned to explore how repetition
functions in the signalling and construction of coherence. Others (e.g. Coulthard, Scott) take a more directly applied
perspective and use the phenomenon of repetition in order to investigate other issues. Darnton’s paper falls
into this latter group: she is interested above all in the potential usefulness of repetition in helping children learn to
read.

Following arguments put forward by Hasan (1984) and Hoey (1991a, b), she stresses that it is not repetition
in itself which should be focused on, but repetition in context. The repetition of individual lexical items in a story may
be useful in that the children meet the same words several times, which presumably helps them in the long run to
recognize and remember those words. However, if the context in which a particular word appears is constantly
changing, there may be nothing to indicate to the children that they have already met the word; so there is less chance
that they will recognize it and they may fall back on deciphering it letter by letter much as they did the first time they
met it. If, however, they meet the word several times in a similar context they are more likely to use higher-level
reading skills of deduction: they ‘know’ in advance what the word will be, and therefore, rather than
working painstakingly from letter to word to meaning, they check that the word they see on the page corresponds to
the word (and meaning) that they expect. This is more or less what experienced adult readers do, and thus the children
are being positively supported in developing the kind of reading skills that they should be aiming at.

In order to show how this works, Darnton analyses a number of stories — some traditional, some
contemporary — that are included in holistic early reading schemes. She argues that a key feature of repetition
in these stories is that it typically occurs in the context of Matching relations (Hoey 1983). In a Matching relation,
some elements are held constant — i.e. repeated — and one or more elements are changed. To take a
well-known example from ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ (in an invented but recognizable retelling):

First she tasted the porridge in the big bowl, but it was too hot.

Then she tasted the porridge in the middle-sized bowl, but it was too cold.

(The repeated elements are in italics.) This example shows matching at the level of sentences; but Darnton points out
that many stories can be seen as ‘repeated sequence narratives’, in which the matching occurs at the
level of the episodes of the story. She defines this more closely by using the tagmemic model devised by Pike and Pike
(1983), in which each purposeful sequence of actions by one of the characters which advances the plot is known as a
‘vector’ (Goldilocks’ actions in satisfying her needs by means of the bears’ resources
— porridge, chairs and beds — constitute a vector in that narrative). Darnton shows how each set of
major Matching relations in the stories she analyses fits within a different vector, thus sharing a common framework.
This framework provides support for the reader in building up expectations not only as to what words will re-occur
(thus helping the child to recognize them when they appear), but also as to how the story will develop (thus helping
the child, on meeting an unfamiliar word, to narrow down the possible meanings). The essential role of repetition in
the life of an emergent reader is therefore, she argues, to encourage success in coping with the demands of reading
purposefully and fluently.