Abstract
Previous research on narrative discourse has indicated that there are cross-cultural differences in narrative construction, and shown that L2 learners tend to carry their L1 narrative style over to their L2 narrative performance. However, little is known about whether L2 learners’ knowledge of the L2 in turn influences their L1 narrative performance. The present study was undertaken to explore bi-directional cross-linguistic influence (i.e., L1 influence on L2 and L2 influence on L1) in Chinese EFL learners’ written narrative styles of their two languages from a multicompetence perspective. Four groups of college students were recruited. They were English native speakers, Chinese native speakers, and Chinese EFL learners at the intermediate and advanced levels. There were 25 people in each group. The participants were asked to write about a frightening experience they had ever had. Their narratives were analyzed in terms of the use of narrative structure and evaluative devices. As regards data analysis, the Chinese EFL learners’ English and Chinese narratives were compared to those of English and Chinese native controls to examine the possible cross-linguistic influence from both directions. In addition, the Chinese EFL learners’ written narratives in their L1 and L2 were compared to see if they adopted the same or different sets of narrative writing strategies in the two languages. The results indicate the strong L1 influence on L2 but weak L2 influence on L1. In terms of L1 influence on L2, like the Chinese native controls, both intermediate and advanced EFL learner groups provided a prologue and a coda significantly more often than the English native controls when writing L2 narrative essays. As for the use of evaluative devices, similar to the Chinese native controls, the advanced EFL learners employed significantly more expressions referring to reported speech in their L2 English narratives than the English native controls. L2 influence on L1, on the other hand, was less evident and was only observed in the advanced learners. When writing their L1 narrative essays, the advanced learners produced significantly more evaluative remarks than the Chinese native controls to express their personal feelings and comments on the story, as the English native controls did. However, the EFL learners’ overall use of narrative structure and evaluative devices in their L1 was basically similar to that of the Chinese native controls. Moreover, within-group comparisons reveal that the EFL learners at both proficiency levels tended to adopt L1-based narrative rhetorical styles in writing both their L1 and L2 essays. The results of the present study indicate that both intermediate and advanced EFL learners basically had not yet acquired the L2 written narrative styles. This is probably because the EFL learners learned English in a non-native environment, where they did not have enough opportunities to interact with L2 native speakers in their daily lives and learn the L2 narrative conventions from them. In addition, L2 narrative writing instruction is seldom taught in the foreign language classroom. Due to these factors, it may not be surprising to see that the EFL learners had difficulty acquiring the L2 narrative writing conventions, and so their knowledge of the L2 was less likely to influence their L1 narrative writing performance. Taken together, the present study suggests that the socio-cultural values, language learning/use environment and writing instruction may play a role in the bi-directional interaction between the L2 learner’s written narrative competences of the two languages.