Picture or non-picture? The influence of narrative task types on lower- and higher-proficiency EFL learners’ oral production

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Picture-based storytelling tasks, i. e. telling a story relying on some
pictures, and short speech tasks, i. e. producing a speech with a given topic
without pictures, are two types of oral narrative tasks widely adopted in previous studies. However, few have discussed what effects these two types of tasks
may exert on second language learners’ speaking performance. In this study,
sixty English as a foreign language learners, divided into lower- and higherproficiency groups, performed a picture-based storytelling task and a short
speech task. Stimulated recalls were collected from seventeen participants.
Their oral discourses were analysed in terms of complexity, accuracy, and
fluency. Stimulated recalls were analysed based on Levelt’s speaking model.
The short speech tasks raised participants’ accuracy and lexical complexity and
were more effective for higher-proficient learners regarding structural complexity. The findings yield suggestions for designing oral narrative tasks for EFL
learners with different L2 proficiency levels.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)383-409
JournalIRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
Volume60
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2022

Keywords

  • narrative task
  • oral performance
  • picture prompts
  • task-based language teaching

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Picture or non-picture? The influence of narrative task types on lower- and higher-proficiency EFL learners’ oral production'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this