| This thesis reports a study on how the Chinese tertiary EFL learners tend to structure their oral narrative discourse, with a particular emphasis on the opening and ending part in the oral narratives. The research design embraces two major issues in relation to discourse structure. One is the macrostructure underlying the learners'oral narrative production driven by the speaking task in oral assessment settings, and the other is related to the differences in the use of opening and ending strategies across both different topics and the learners of different levels. The ultimate purpose of the this study is to offer an partial picture of the discourse competence acquired by Chinese learners of English while accomplishing the speaking task of talking on an given topic in an oral assessment setting. Specifically, the research questions to be addressed include:1) How do the Chinese tertiary EFL learners begin and end their oral narratives in an oral assessment context?2) How does the learners'use of narrative opening and ending strategies vary across the different topics of the speaking tasks?3) How does the learners'use of narrative opening and ending strategies vary across the learners of different oral proficiency levels?The data used for this study were selected from SWECCL, a learners corpus, from which, 60 sampled cases were chosen, and further divided into higher- and lower-groups for the purpose of comparisons. The study adopted the qualitative approach in the data analysis, and case studies were also conducted in order to obtain the extra evidence to supplement the findings yielded by the qualitative approach. The detailed analysis of all the sampled cases generated the following findings:First, there are three macro-categories which constitute the macrostructure of the Chinese EFL learners'oral narratives in testing situations, namely, topic identification, topic elaboration and terminative topic evaluation. These categories constitute a macrostructural pattern across all the cases investigated and make it possible to mark off the opening and ending part in an oral narrative. Of the three macro-categories, topic identification is an obligatory strategy used by the test performers to start their narrative talk while accomplishing their speaking task while terminative topic evaluation is an optional choice of strategy to finish their narrative talk.Second, cross-topic comparisons reveal that:(1) There is a strong consistency between person-oriented and event-oriented cases in that Immediate Topic Identification was employed by the learners as the first choice of strategy to begin their narrative talk. This suggests that the test-takers, explicitly or implicitly, regarded their talk as a response to their invisible examiners, or hypothetical audience as if they were talking to someone physically present in a kind of conversational interaction or an interview exchange. In this sense, the speaker's monologic production in testing situations was, characterized by some dialogic features to some extent.(2) There is a conspicuous difference in the use of Delayed Topic Identification between person-oriented and event-oriented cases in that Delayed Topic Identification enjoys twice higher frequency of use among person-oriented cases and that Implicit Topic Identification only occurs with event-oriented cases. This suggests that the topic differences may produce a certain degree of effect on the choice of the strategies learners may make to begin their oral narratives.(3) Although there is a very high occurrence of Topic Clarification (TC) with the cases of both topics, the role of TC is found to be functionally different in the speaking tasks of talking on different topics. The recurring features of TC in the process of identifying the topic suggests that the test-takers used this opening strategy to gain more time in the online processing of the theme they were supposed to focused on.(4) No difference is found to be related to the different topics in the learners'choice of terminative topic evaluation, suggesting the learners tended to choose Topic Evaluation as a terminative strategy regardless of topics of any type.Third, cross-level comparisons indicate that:(1) At the macro-level, the major structural difference is manifested in the presence or absence of terminative topic evaluation between high- and low-level groups of cases, which suggests that the higher-level speakers pursued the sense of wholeness in constructing the discourse.(2) At the micro-level, the differences are found more in the different opening strategies than ending strategies. Specifically, 1)no difference is found between high- and low-level groups as a whole in the use of Immediate Topic Identification as a narrative beginning, which suggests Immediate Topic Identification is a relatively easier opening strategy to start a narrative talk on both an event-oriented and person-oriented topics. 2) The very low frequency of Delayed Topic Identification and the scanty occurrences of Implicit Topic Identification in both higher- or lower-level groups suggest that the use of Delayed and Implicit ID is a question of strategy choice. 3) There is a consistency in Topic Clarification between high- and low-level speakers, suggesting that TC is likely to be a consequence from the testing situations, but it has its own discourse function in constructing a beginning segment of oral narrative beginning. 4) The high-level speakers employed various means of topic evaluation to complete their story or as more effective ways of discourse closure.This study may have several implications. Theoretically, some of the findings generated from this study have confirmed some of the mainstream general theories of narrative discourse while others have extended the current theoretical hypotheses in one way or another. Practically, this study has offered some insights into the scoring systems in assessing L2 learners'spoken discourse, and some empirical evidence may contribute pedagogically to the learning and teaching of spoken English in China. |
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