I-RU SU (NATIONAL TSING HUA UNIVERSITY)

A COMPARISON OF ORAL AND WRITTEN NARRATIVE DISCOURSE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE : LINGUISTICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, AND RELATED AREAS

Due to the differences in the processing constraints and communicative conditions, speech and writing have been shown to exhibit different patterns in discourse organization and linguistic properties (Chafe, 1982; Ravid & Berman, 2006). An inspection of the literature that compared oral and written discourse has revealed that most of the studies mainly looked at the language production of native speakers (e.g., Chafe & Danielwicz, 1987; Pu, 2006) or concerned the correlation between oral language and written language ability of monolingual children (e.g., Ravid & Berman, 2006; Pinto et al., 2015); few studies have explored whether second or foreign language users’ spoken and written productions display different structures and linguistic features between the two modalities of expressions, and to what extent the distinct patterns in the oral and written discourse of L2 users resemble or deviate from those of native speakers of the target language. The present study attempted to address these issues by examining Chinese EFL learners’ oral and written narratives of a wordless story book and comparing them to those of English native speakers. The participants’ oral and written narratives were compared in terms of narrative structure, evaluative language, and cohesion. Results showed that oral and written narrative discourse exhibited distinctive patterns across all participant groups, and that EFL learners and English native speakers displayed both parallels and discrepancies in the discernible patterns found within oral and written narrations.

I-Ru Su is a professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of National Tsing Hua University. Her research interests mainly lie in second language acquisition, particularly regarding issues of language transfer.