Comparative Analysis of Children’s Narratives in English: ESL vs. EFL and Nonnative vs. Native Contrasts

The purpose of this study was to find out what characteristics Korean child learners of English showed when they were asked to describe the same wordless picture book. Three Korean child learners of English and one native English-speaking child in Grade 3 served as language informants for this study. Their narratives were compared with respect to the following questions: (i) Are there any differences between performing a narrative task in an ESL context and performing the task in an EFL context? (ii) What are the differences between a nonnative child learner’s narratives and an English native speaker’s narratives? Collected data were analyzed in terms of the following criteria: the Analysis of Speech-units (AS-units); the number of Noun Phrases (NPs); the number of Verb Phrases (VPs); and the number of tokens (Tokens). Only the last sampling of each child’s performance was used for this comparison. The following are the findings: (i) AS-units ESLL used were quite well-formed in general, but some of EFLLs’ AS-units were ill-formed. (ii) The total number of NPs ESLL used doubled the number of NPs each EFLL used. (iii) EFLLs used an ill-formed subtype of VP, *[be + V + NP] VP , which was not used by ESLL. (iv) Nouns were most frequently used by all Korean children, but Modals were used only by ESLL who picked up some words like muffin, crumb, and seed, naturally. (v) ESLL’s narratives were more informative than ENSC’s narratives. (vi) ESLL showed a tendency to use more sophisticated NPs than ENSC. (vii) Both ENSC and ESLL used [V + NP + PP] VP and [V + PP + (PP)] VP most frequently. (viii) ESLL used Nouns most frequently while ENSC used Verbs most frequently.