Coherence and Cohesion in the Narratives of Korean EFL Learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines spoken narratives by Korean EFL adult learners and compares them with those by English and Korean native speakers in terms of the coherence and cohesion of the story. Two groups of 44 subjects were individually asked to tell a story while looking at a series of 12 pictures in accordance with a given title. This study looked at the area of subject assignment to measure the coherence of the narratives under the assumption that the choice of syntactic subject is one of the important devices that a speaker uses for the global and local coherence of a story he or she is producing. Furthermore, we examined the use of conjunctions, with a focus on because, to see the use of cohesive devices in their narratives. Our hypotheses are: (a) Learners will be likely to concentrate on describing on-going events neglecting global coherence or continuity with previous discourse, and (b) learners will tend to underuse or misuse cohesive markers compared to native speakers. The results show that adult learners do know how to tell a story, being able to take into account both the global and local themes of the story, but that their lack of linguistic ability, along with the short-term memory constraints, prevents them from giving continuity with the previous theme in their story. Moreover, learners are aware of cohesive ties to make their stories coherent, but they sometimes overuse or misuse them in discourse.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theoretical Background
• 3. Experiment
• 4. Local and Global Coherence in EFL Lerner Narrative
• 5. Use of Cohesive Devices in Korean EFL Learner Narrative
• 6. Conclusion
• References