Written vs Spoken Narratives by Indonesian ESL Young Learners: A Case Study

Abstract

This study explores how Indonesian ESL Grade 2 elementary students studying in an international school in Jakarta produce written and spoken narratives. The stimulus material used to obtain the data was a four-panel comic strip with no written text. The findings revealed that both productions follow the basic global structure such as story elements, linearity of the storyline, and coherence. However, the written narratives contextually demonstrated formality while the spoken narratives displayed higher frequencies in using structure of discourse (e.g. hedges, contraction, repair and repetitions) and sentence complexity in T-units. Hedges were used as delaying tactics to allow more time for language processing. The use of contractions was due to the rapid production of language that constraints the ability of the students to produce syntactic richness. Repairs illustrated specificity of the chosen words, while repetition stemmed from the linguistic device like onomatopoeia that demonstrated the creative sides of the students to amplify their thoughts. Apparently, sentence complexity using the T-units demonstrated that the spoken narratives outnumbered the written mode. Nevertheless, it was apparent that the 2 T-units or 3 T-units followed a pattern (e.g. independent clause to independent clause with extension) which was a product of the participants knowledge on spellings and construction of formal and complete sentences. These results may implicate that language educators need to heighten the learners awareness of the unique linguistic features of each mode, to provide a clear understanding on how these modes work best in English language, and to attempt in establishing a balance in structure discourse and sentence complexity in T-units.Keywords: ESL young learners, written and spoken narratives, pattern of differences

Discourse Structures in the Narratives of Grade 3 Swazi Learners

“…Also, in the analysis of the children's narrative production there were many hesitations/self-repairs and repetitions in the spoken modality when compared to the written modality. This finding is shared by several researchers [20]; [61]; [22]; [32] who conducted studies in narrative production. However, it should be noted that most repetitions in this study were due to the speech planning processes and the nature of the task.…”

“…In a study conducted by [22] of Indonesian ESL Grade 2 elementary students' written and oral narratives it was found that both discourse productions had the crucial story components or structures. On the contrary, the written narratives were more formal whereas the spoken narratives used discourse structures such as contraction, hedges, repair, and repetitions.…”

“…The findings indicate that there were contractions in the children's narrative discourse production. Contractions are informal shortened language forms commonly used in speech because of the nature of rapid real-time language production [22]). There were many instances of contractions in the corpus of narrative productions, and all contractions were found in the narrations in speech compared to written narrations.…”

“…Our findings reveal that there were many lexical repetitions in the spoken narrative production of the children compared to their written narrations. [22] state that lexical repair or repetition entails the lexical changes done by a speaker during the narration while the syntactic repetitions/repairs are the changes done to the verb tense during the narration. There were a total of 37 lexical and syntactic repairs/repetitions in the oral narrative production of this corpus.…”