The Role of Conjunctions in EFL Learners' Narrative Development

Abstract

Narrative as one the social practice to negotiate and renegotiate meaning in the process of socialization has regained a specific attention in the recent years. The growing literature has provided a rich documentation on children's oral and written skills. Current research on different narrative strategies across cultures have contributed little to the use of conjunctive adverbs in narrating or re narrating of the stories among school level children. To this end,  this study investigated the application of conjunctions in narrative organization using the story telling and story retelling as the medium of instruction among sixty intermediate and advanced level EFL learners. The findings revealed that the four types of additive, temporal, casual, and adversative conjunctions emerged differently among learners with two levels of language fluency based on the content and the type of the medium instructed. The findings also manifested positive transfer of mother tongue on the application of specific conjunctive elements. The findings further suggested that influential trainings are required in EFL classrooms to promote the application of conjunctions in narratives, since they are consequential tools to improve the learners' linguistic, cognitive and communicative skills.

Author
Leila Sayah, Azar Hosseini Fatemi.