CHAPTER V PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
5.3 Suggestions for Taiwanese Senior High School Teachers for Teaching and
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of personal pronouns. There is a notable problem in that the students use the same nouns to be the referent because they have little knowledge of synonym. The concept of the synonym can help the students add the lexical abundance in the writing.
Furthermore, learning synonym can help the students master the words and their contexts, and decrease the errors of unsuitable use of a word.
Aside from the lexical aspect, the third suggestion relates to Simple Past Tense, which is one of the linguistic features of the narrative formulated in this study.
Although the simple past tense is used in students' narratives, the presence of the simple present tense can also be found in some of sentences in their narratives. The simple present tense is the basic grammar learned by the students in the early learning stage, so the students may use this tense when they are not concentrating on the adjacent sentence. Moreover, Chinese is a language without the concept of tenses. As a result, mastering tenses would be relatively difficult for Chinese English learners.
Therefore, we suggest that students should pay attention to tense agreement by more practice of the narrative or more awareness of the context.
5.3 Suggestions for Taiwanese Senior High School Teachers for Teaching and Grading Narratives
In Taiwanese education, English compositions start to be emphasized in senior
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high school. The reason for this may be that English writing is added in the college entrance exam. Most students do not have experience in writing English compositions before they get to senior high school. Therefore, the teaching of English writing is essential for these beginners of English writing. However, many teachers in senior high school do not have enough time to teach their students how to write English compositions. Teachers pay attention to teaching the lexicon and the grammar within each lesson in English textbooks. Numerous senior high school students have to face English writing in the third grade of the senior high school without understanding each type of writing and the organization of all the sentences. Most of them have a problem that they transfer the way of Chinese writing into English writing. As a result, Chinese English and indirect writing pattern found in ESL writing research (Kaplan, 2001) may also be the characteristics of Taiwanese senior school students’ English writings and the reasons for the low grades of English writings.
Accordingly, we suggest that, in teaching narrative, the definition of the narrative writing should be taught first. The definition can give the students a whole picture of the narrative and know its purpose. Next, the linguistic features of the narrative can be taught with the narrative of English textbooks or written by English native speakers.
The students can acquire that the narrative is composed of many events, and these events can be narrated by Agentive Subject and Action Verb. Because most sentences
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in the narrative were constructed with Agentive Subject and Action Verb, sentences with Active Voice are in the majority. With many similar personal pronouns of Agentive Subject, Perspective can be presented in the narrative. As for the coherence and cohesion, the link between the sentences can be realized by Constant Themes because of the personal pronouns or the adverbial phrase in the narrative. And the consequent actions can reveal Chronological Order of the narrative.
As for grading the narrative, we found that the use of certain words and the grammar are still the main factors affecting the grades of the narrative in the rater's mind, based on the finding in this study. According to the grading system published by the College Entrance Exam Center (CEEC), the content, organization, use of grammar, use of vocabulary and the format of the punctuation and the letter are five indices for evaluating student's narrative. However, in the grading system and the rater in this study, these indices in grading the writing do not change with different types of writing. Each type of writing has the specified linguistic features to synthesize it. In this study, seven linguistic features of the narrative are found; this may prove that these linguistic features are essential and significant to narrative writing. Therefore, the grading system should add the index of the linguistic features of each type of writing because students’ uses of the linguistic features can interpret their correct knowledge of each type of writing and present their abilities to
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discriminate each type of writing.
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CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
This chapter offers the summary and conclusion of the whole study. Four sections are included in this chapter. The first section summarizes the findings of this study. The second section focuses on the significance of this study. The third section presents the limitations of this study. In the last section, suggestions for further research are provided.
6.1 Summary of the Major Findings
In this study, we have investigated linguistic features of the narrative, their presence in the narratives in English textbooks and students' writings, and the significant grades-related linguistic features of the students' narratives. We randomly selected five narratives from a college writing textbook for the data of native English speakers to formulate the linguistic features of the narrative with the indices contained in Biber's linguistic features (1988). Then, the linguistic features were used to analyze the five narratives of English textbooks by random selection. Fifty students' narratives are also included in this analysis. All the students' narratives are graded by a rater. The grades of each student’s narrative and the linguistic features of the narrative were
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calculated by the statistical program for finding the grades-related features of importance.
At first, the analysis of the narratives of native English native speakers was conducted to answer our first research question: What are linguistic features in the narratives of English native writers? The formulation of the linguistic feature of the narrative shows that the seven linguistic features are found in these narratives: (1) Agentive Subject, (2) Action Verb, (3) Active Voice, (4) Simple Past Tense, (5) First Person Perspective, (6) Constant Themes, and (7) Chronological Order. All the narratives written by native English speakers used high frequency of the personal singular pronouns or the names as the subjects in the sentences. These subjects were chosen for the combination of numerous action verbs found in each sentence. Due to the significant use of the agentive subject and the action verb in every sentence, the active voice is more common than the passive voice. In the aspect of the verb tense, all the native English speakers used the simple past tense to compose the narration. In their minds, the narrative regarded as an event or experience in the past. From the aspect of the link of the sentences, constant themes are remarkable for their abundant agentive subjects as the topic or the theme of the sentence. These constant themes are frequently used to achieve the coherence in these narratives or to narrate a series of actions accomplished by employing the agentive subject. In addition to achieving the
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constant themes among the sentences, these agentive subjects, which include many first person singular pronouns, convey the prominent choice of the first person perspective in the narrative. Furthermore, each action verb in these narratives occurs in a chronological order to present the whole course of events in the narrative, so the chronological order is a linguistic feature in the narrative. Hence, based on this
analysis of the narratives of native English speakers and the indices offered by Biber’s linguistic features (1988), the seven linguistic features of the narrative are established in this study.
In order to understand whether the narratives written by Taiwanese English learners, including the narratives from Taiwanese English textbooks and Taiwanese senior high school students’ writings, we executed an analysis of these narratives with the seven linguistic features of the narrative to answer our second research question:
Based on linguistic features in the narratives of English native writers, what are the similarities and differences between the narratives of Taiwanese English textbooks and Taiwanese senior high school students’ writing?
According to the results, all the narratives used Agentive Subject to refer to the doer of the action in each sentence for the reason that in these narratives, many actions are included to synthesize the overall event of the narration. As for the use of the verb type, Action Verb is found in the narrative of English textbooks and the
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students’ writings. When these writers used the agentive subjects in the narrative, they tend to choose the action verb instead of the stative verb to follow, for emphasizing the link between the subject and the verb. Because of the numerous presence of the agentive verb and the action verb, the use of Active Voice is the most common form in each sentence. These sentences with the active voice are composed by the agentive subjects and the action verbs or the verb to be. However, few sentences with the passive voice are found in these narratives for the description of things. As for the use of Simple Past Tense, most of these narratives used verbs with the simple past tense, and only eight students’ narratives employed the simple present tense. In these eight narratives, some verbs with the simple past tense are used, especially in the presence of dialogue. These students may have been affected by the narratives of English textbooks because the narratives of English textbooks are the main material for learning English writing, and commonly present verbs with the simple past tense.
Although the students used the simple present tense for the verb, the use of the verb tense in the narratives of English textbooks would impact the consistency of the verb tense. Regarding the choice of First Person Perspective, the narratives of the English textbook and the students’ writings exhibit a difference in the numbers. The first person perspective is used more in the students’ narratives but less in the narratives of English textbooks. The reason for this is the consideration of the type or context of the
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narrative. Most narratives of English textbooks aim to express the interior meaning of the story type (the narrative), so the narrator is seldom the character in the story. In the students’ writing, the context of the picture is the classroom, so the students relate to the context of the narrative. Furthermore, we also found that the students using the third person perspective in the narrative attained the lower grades for their narratives because of the detailed description of the character. For the presence of Constant Themes, although narratives without constant themes can be found in these narratives, many writers of these narratives employ constant themes in the narrative. In the narratives with constant themes, three types of constant themes are used frequently as constant themes: the first person pronouns, the third person referent, including the third person pronouns and the name, and the adverbs and prepositional phrases. In narratives with first person pronouns as constant themes, the themes are repeated with the first person pronouns, but the themes of other two types are more flexible.
Regarding Chronological Order, all the action verbs used in the narratives of English textbooks and the students’ writing follow this pattern. Accordingly, the narration can proceed in a smooth sequence without the insertion of the action at a different time.
Lastly, in order to understand the relation of the grades of the students’ narratives to the linguistic features, the evaluation of their correlation were assessed to provide the answer for our third research question: What are the significant grade-related
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linguistic features of Taiwanese students' narratives?
The results show that eight grades-related linguistic features are significant in affecting the grades of the students’ narratives: (1) The Number of Words, (2) Lexical Diversity of All the Words, (3) Syntax Sentence Similarity of Adjacent Sentences, (4) Hypernymy for Nouns and Verbs, (5) Syntax Sentence Similarity across Paragraphs, (6) Meaningfulness of Content Words, (7) Noun Overlap of All Sentences and (8) Imagability for Content Words. Only the first two linguistic features are positively related to the grades; the other six linguistic features have a negative relation to the grades. Except for the number of the words, the other seven grades-related linguistic features can be further grouped into three categorizations: (1) Lexical Sophistication, (2) Syntactic Complexity and (3) Cohesive Devices. Most of the grades-related linguistic features are included in the first two categorizations; this presents that the use of the lexicon and the syntax is an important consideration for the rater to grade a student’s narrative.
6.2 Significance of the Present Study
In Taiwan, the writing ability of English narratives is more and more important to senior high school students. However, the performance of students’ narrative writings in recent years is not ideal and the possible reason may be the insufficient
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knowledge of English narratives. In this study, the seven linguistic features of English narratives are established. These linguistic features cannot only help the students to discriminate the narrative from other types of writing, but also offer the guide to write an English narrative. Furthermore, based on the formulation of these linguistic
features, the effect of the type of the writing to the presence of the linguistic features is further confirmed.
The analysis of the narratives of Taiwanese English textbooks and Taiwanese senior high school students’ writings showed that the use of the seven linguistic features of the narrative is prominent and verified the fact that the articles in
Taiwanese English textbooks are essential for the students’ writing. We also found the significant grades-related linguistic features of students’ narratives in this study. These linguistic features provide the tendency of the teacher’s grading.
To the implications for the teaching and learning English narratives, the findings of the study offer the teachers the linguistic features as the useful tools in English narrative’s teaching and a new consideration for grading the students’ narratives. To the students, they can learn the narrative writing better with the linguistic features and improve their narratives effectively based on the grades-related linguistic features.
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6.3 Limitations of the Present Study
The present study formulated the seven linguistic features of the narrative by analyzing the narratives written by native English speakers. Followed by this finding, the narratives of Taiwanese English textbooks and Taiwanese senior high school students’ writings were estimated according to the use of linguistic features.
Furthermore, eight significant grades-related linguistic features were found by the statistical program. However, some limitations exist in this study. First, the form of the narrative used in this study is not consistent. Most of the narratives from native English speakers and Taiwanese English textbooks were not written with sequential pictures, while all the students made their narratives with them. We believe the result of the analysis would be more convincing if a similar form of the narrative is
collected in this study. Second, whether each student of the students’ narratives has the narrative ability is unknown. If the narratives written by students without the narrative ability were used for this study, the absence of the linguistic features may result from the lack of the narrative ability, and not insufficient knowledge of the linguistic features of the narrative. Therefore, we think the narrative ability of the student should be measured to provide a more robust result of the analysis. Third, the small number of the rater in this study may be another problem. There should be more raters for grading students' English narratives. The mean of each student's grade from
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the raters can be more appropriate for the study. Furthermore, the narratives of native English speakers should be evaluated by the rater to confirm that these narratives are the high grades narratives. There may be different recognitions between a good narrative for native English speakers and a high grades narrative for Taiwanese college entrance exams. The differences may affect the availability of the linguistic features of the narrative for the pedagogical use.
6.4 Suggestions for Further Research
For the further research on a similar topic, the suggestions are to improve the limitations of the present study. First, the narratives collected for the study should have a similar form because the same form of the narrative can help to generate more convincing results. Second, the students' narratives should be chosen among students with narrative ability to ensure the credibility of the results. Third, the choice of the rater should be appropriate. The rater in real college entrance exams is the professor, and each student’s narrative is graded by two professors at least. Therefore, we suggest the rater of the further research should be two or more professors, and the grades of the narratives of the study can be more accurate. Finally, in this study, seven linguistic features of the narrative were formulated. Linguistic features of the
narrative offer the students a basic construction of the English narrative and help them
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distinguish the narrative and the descriptive. In addition to the narrative, expository is also a common type of the writing for college entrance exams. Therefore, further research can inquire the linguistic features of expository essays.
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