A Developmental Study Of Discourse Structure In Chinese EFL Learners’Oral Narratives Elicited With A Non-verbal Prompt From Pictures

This thesis reports a cross-sectional study which was undertaken to explore the discourse structure generated from the Chinese EFL learners’oral narrative prompted by the given pictures. The purpose of the present study was to investigate developmental change in oral narrative from the secondary educational stage of EFL learning to the early tertiary educational stage of EFL learning, focusing on discourse structure on both macro-and micro-level. To be specific, the study aims to answer the following three questions:(1) What are possible discourse structures at a macro-level that can be identified from Chinese EFL learners’oral narratives on given pictures?(2) What are possible micro discourse structures that can be identified from Chinese EFL Learners’ oral narratives?(3) What is the developmental change in discourse structures across the different learning stages?Data employed in this study were oral compositions made by33Senior-2students and33Grade-2English majors who were required to describe a series of pictures within a limited amount of time. All of their oral work was recorded and transcribed. The sampled cases of different learning stages were analyzed qualitatively to identify and categorize the narrative components. The data analysis generated the following findings:Firstly, at the macro-level, three major components were identified in the learners’ oral description of the pictures on the basis of their shared discourse features: Identification, Illustration, and Evaluation. The major components in macrostructure indicate that the Chinese EFL learners have already developed a schema of narrative talk regardless of whether they are at a high or low learning stage.Secondly, Identification at the micro-level may have three types:(1) Theme-oriented Description, in which the students may start their talk with the generalization of a theme behind the pictures they were going to describe.(2) Task-oriented Description, in which the students may start their talk by saying a bit about the task they were going to do.(3) Absence of Identification of any kind, in which the students came to the task of the description without any preparation for the listeners.Illustration at the micro-level consists of two minor categories. The first is Picture-based Description, in which the speakers’talks centers on the given pictures either in a temporal sequence or in a spatial sequence. The second is Non-picture-based Description, in which the body of the speakers’talk is inspired by or related to the pictures but the speakers gave no description about the pictures.The category of Evaluation at the micro-level may have two types. One is Theme Restatement, in which the speaker may terminate the talk by restating or paraphrasing the theme, if any, mentioned earlier in the beginning of the talk. The other is Evaluating Remarks, in which the speaker may close the talk with some commentary words. The components at both macro-and micro-level provide a general picture of discourse structure in the Chinese EFL learners’oral narratives elicited from pictures.Thirdly, the cross-level comparisons reveal:(1) Most speakers tend to go directly to the picture describing without making any preparations for the task. The Theme-Oriented Identification enjoys a relatively higher percentage than the Task-Oriented Description to start the talk.(2) In the body part, some differences have been detected. In the case of Picture-based Description, higher-stage students have a tendency to use more temporally-bounded description. But it can’t fully suggest that Temporally Sequenced Description is better than Spatially Sequenced Description.(3) Both the high school students and college students have the sense of the completion of the talk. College students prefer to end their talk with some evaluative words.The findings yielded from this study may have both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, the macro structure identified in this study suggests that narrative units are more or less the same at a very high level regardless of different levels of proficiency, which has confirmed Rumelhart’s (1975,1977)(and many others’) claim that prototypical elements are universally present in stories. The notion of sequential description in this study may also have also some theoretical implications about story grammar or story schema. Practically, this study has offered insights into the significant role of message sequencing in L2learners’discourse competence development, and into the assessment of the learners’oral discourse ability in both testing and instructional settings.