Introducing a new protagonist in L2 Chinese narratives: Syntactic construction and information organization

Abstract

Building a complex discourse is not an easy task for second language learners. This study investigates how learners that have French as their first language (L1) and Chinese as a second language (L2) convey the function of referent introduction in narratives. It aims to identify which syntactic constructions are used to highlight new information and relate it to given information at the utterance level, and how learners organize information between utterances to ensure discourse cohesion. The procedure used consists of the analysis of an oral corpus collected from five groups of participants ( N = 110): French and Chinese native speakers, and three groups of learners (low, intermediate and advanced levels). The stimulus of the elicited task is a comic strip. The results show that low learners mostly follow the canonical word order, while intermediate learners demonstrate more syntactic diversity but still differ from native speakers at the discourse level. Advanced learners almost achieved native-like proficiency and demonstrated only one difference when compared with the target pattern that lies in the lexical-semantic characteristics of the predicate used.