Coherence and Cohesion in the Narratives of Korean ESL Learners

Abstract

This study examines spoken narratives by Korean ESL 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 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 following three areas measure the degree of coherence and cohesion of a narrative: 1) subject assignment, 2) referential management, and 3) use of connectives. Our hypotheses are as follows: 1) Learner narratives will be different from native speaker narratives in that they are more like a collection of events, rather than a thematically coherent one, and do not use appropriate cohesive devices. 2) This tendency will be affected by the English proficiency of the learners. That is, lower-level learners are likely to concentrate on describing the on-going events neglecting local and global coherence.