Reference 1:
Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1992). The telling of a tale: Discourse
structure and tense use in learners' narratives. Pragmatics
and Language Learning, 3, 144-161.
Reference 2:
Hinkel, E. (1992). L2 tense and time reference. TESOL Quarterly,
26 (3), 557-571.
Reference 3:
Schiffrin, D. (1981). Tense variation in narrative. Language,
57, 45-62.
Reference 4:
Mullins, J. Teaching the grammar of past time narrative.
<http://arachnid.Gsu.EDU/~wwwesl/issue1/mullins1.htm>
(1997, January 23).
Reference 5:
Carrell, P. (1984). Evidence of formal schema in second language
comprehension. Language Learning, 34, 87-112.
Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1992) The telling of a tale: Discourse structure and tense use in learners' narratives. Pragmatics and Language Learning. 3, 144-161.
This study focuses upon the types of verb tenses used by NNS when asked to recount a narrative. Bardovi-Harlig indicates in this article that it is the structure of the narrative "that is the key to understanding the use of tense by language learners" (p. 144). This structure consists of two parts, the foreground and background. The foreground "relates events belonging to the skeletal structure of the discourse. . . The background does not itself narrate main events, but provides supportive material which elaborates on or evaluates the events in the foreground (Hopper 1979)" (Bardovi-Harlig, p. 144). The study divided the tenses into two broad categories to test their distribution across foreground and background: 1) "past," which consisted of mostly simple past, but also a few instances of past progressive, past perfect, and the past modal "could" + verb, and 2) "nonpast," which consisted of base forms (go, come, etc.), present tense forms, the present modal "can" + verb, and the present perfect.
The story given the learners was told entirely in past tense. The learners were later asked to recall the story both orally and in writing. The most consistent use of past tense in the written narratives occurred in the high intermediate group, which suggested a developmental difference in tense usage. Also, past tense was the dominant form in the foreground and nonpast was the dominant form in the background. This was said to produce "a heightened distinction of the narrative line" (p. 153).
Bardovi-Harlig also illustrates how verb tense is used differently in the five background categories proposed by Schriffrin (1981): orientation, embedded orientation, external evaluation, and coda. She found that the opening and closing segments, or boundaries of the narratives (introductory orientation and codas) are most frequently in nonpast. Yet the embedded orientations, external evaluations and abstracts use past and nonpast about equally. Also noted is a high rate of nonpast forms before direct speech that mark a change in voice from the narrator to a character in this way.
"...the use of tense by adult intermediate-level learners of English can best be understood through the discourse structure of the narrative" (p. 159).
This quote most succinctly summed up Bardovi-Harlig's claims. Her interpretations of the dicourse structure of the narrative gave me great insight into how learners may be using tense and aspect to create narrative, and also the reverse--using narrative structures to increase their overall understanding of the English verb system.
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is assistant professor of Linguistics at Indiana University. She has published in the areas of second language acquisition, pragmatics, and teacher education.
Further references:
Hopper, P.J. (1979). Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In T. Givon (Ed.), Discourse and Syntax (pp. 213-41). Syntax and Semantics, 12. New York: Academic Press.
Schiffren, D. (1981). Tense variation in narrative. Language. 57, 45-62. [Link to Annotated Summary of Schiffrin article]
Hinkel, E. (1992). L2 tense and time reference. TESOL Quarterly, 26 (3), 557-571.
This study focuses upon the differences between native speakers' (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) concepts of temporal relationships and how these are shown in the grammar of the verb tense/aspect system. Specifically, it focuses upon the inability of many NNS to understand or intuit the time attributes represented by tense and aspect markers in the same way as native speakers.
The data pool in this study consists of a group of students with a mean TOEFL score of 563, with a history of ESL training ranging from 4 to 18 years. These students were described early in the study as having "achieved a relatively high L2 proficiency" (p. 558). The purpose of using such advanced-level students was to illustrate that even though students may have studied the English verb system for years, they may still not understand the temporal concepts that underlie the system and be able to use them correctly.
This group, along with a control group of native speakers, were given multiple choice questionnaires beginning with a sentence, such as "Bob is talking to his brother" (p. 562). After the sentence were two multiple choice selections dealing with tense and aspect:
"1. The time of the action is: a) right now/at the moment of speaking, b)in the present and in the past, c) in the past, d)before another past event, e) cannot decide.
2. The action is: a) progressive, b) repetitive/habitual, c) none of the above, d) cannot decide" (p. 562).
There were 32 such sentences, illustrating 8 tenses in all: present (present simple, present progressive, present perfect and present perfect progressive) and 4 past (past simple, past progressive, past perfect and past perfect progressive).
The results of the study did indeed show that NNS analyses of time attributes in tense markers were significantly different than NS. Only in the use of present progressive did the NNS approximate NS usage. According to Hinkel, this suggests "that, for them, it is the most intuitively accessible deictic point" (p. 564).
One interesting aspect of the study was that the use of past perfect coupled with the lexical reference of "before" in the sentence also rose NNS answers close to a NS level. This seems to suggest that NNS utilize lexical markers in order to intuit time attribtes rather than tense. Hinkel indicates that the use of a lexical marker may be more familiar to NS of a tenseless languge (such as Chinese), which makes more use of lexical and discourse markers to show time reference.
Hinkel concludes the study with 4 interrelated hypotheses:
1) NNS intuitive conceptualizations of time are not linear.
2) Such linear temporatlity and the use of morphological tense may not be fully developed.
3) NNS have limited access to this knowledge.
4) Even years of exposure to an L2 may have a limited impact on their perceptions of the L2 tense system.
Some implications for teaching that follow from this study are that an attempt should be made to initially explain the English tense system in order to help NNS understand the English conceptual notions of time reference and time meaning. Hinkel also concludes that, based on NNS scores in this study, the present progressive, past simple, and past progressive are the most intuitively accessible for NNS, and thus the teaching of English tense should begin with these tense markers.
"... the teaching of English conceptual notions of time, its divisions, and the relationships between these divisions can underlie or even precede the teaching of the tense system and its morphological references" (p. 569).
This quote appealed to me simply because the simplicity of the suggestion belies the difficulty of the act of teaching such conceptual notions to learners who may not have the schemata for comprehending such a system. However, Hinkel does raise this particular question, which is an important one: How do we teach the English verb tense system in a way that will facilitate learners' intuitive grasp of the English time reference system?
At the time of publication, Eli Hinkel was the Coordinator of the ESL Composition Program at The Ohio State University. She received her PhD in linguistics from The University of Michigan in 1984. Her research interests include concept-based transfer and L2 teaching methodologies.
This article, I believe, has implications for the teaching of past time narrative as a way to help build students' conceptual intuition of past time markers. Perhaps through realia such as fiction (stories), historical texts and journalistic articles, one can better help students grasp the linear time structure of English in a contextualized way.
Schiffrin, D. (1981) Tense variation in Narrative. Language, 57, 45-62.
This article studies the ways in which both the past tense and the historical present (HP) serve as ways to refer to past events in narrative. It also demonstrates the "rules" of narrative, which determine where the HP can occur. Seventy-three pieces of data were observed in which three issues are addressed:
1) "constraints on the HP-P variation"
2) "the functions of the HP in narrative"
3) "the reasons for the significance of the HP" (p. 47)
In this context, narratives are defined as "oral versions of experience in which events are relayed in the order in which they presumably occur" (p. 47). Schiffrin also makes these observations:
1) "HP is used to increase the dramatic impact of the story by making the audience feel as if it had been present at the time of the actual experience" (p. 46).
2) The HP is often used to focus on "events seen by the narrator as most important" (p. 46).
In order to understand how Schiffrin breaks such narratives down in order to explain HP constraints, the following categories are given:
1) Abstract - summarizes the experience
2) Orientation clause - describes background information
3) Complicating action clause - "tells the story by relaying a series of temporally ordered narrative events" (p. 48)
4) Evaluative clause - Orientation clause embedded within complicating action clause which serve to add needed background information
5) External evaluative clause - "comment on and interpret events for the audience from a perspetive outside the narrative" (p. 49)
Furthermore, clauses can all differ in terms of "reference time - a point established in relation to ethe time of speaking - and their event time - a point established in relation to other events" (p. 49).
Within this structure, Schiffrin has found that HP never occurs in external evaluation clauses, abstracts or codas, and only to a small extent in orientation clauses. However, complicating action clauses contained as many as 30% HP.
Other findings:
1) "HP and P are more frequent when the prior verb is in the same tense" (p. 51)
2) "Switching between tenses does not occur within single events in a narrative;" (p. 51) rather, it shows a change in action. However, it is only when tense switches occur from HP to P that events are switching in the narrative.
3) HP is used primarily in direct quotes.
"...the historical present can be seen as one of the grammatical resources which speakers use to represent their experiences in narrative" (p. 61)
A good summary of the article, it seems like an excellent quote to present the deeper issues in this very involved article.
At the time of publication, Deborah Schiffrin was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her views on the structure of narrative are referenced widely in the study of past-time narrative.
Mullins, J. Teaching the grammar of past time narrative. <http://arachnid.Gsu.EDU/~wwwesl/issue1/mullins1.htm> (1997, January 23)
This article focuses upon the process of teaching grammar asociated with past time narratives in "clusters," or "meaningful wholes" (p. 1). Within this framework, Mullins focuses upon past tense verbs, third person pronouns, perfect aspect verbs, public verbs and present participials in the order that they occur in authentic texts. Included in the article is a 10-week plan in order to show how these grammar features will be presented and also the types of activities used to present them. In summary, the basic outline for the schedule would be to present the discourse types to the class in order to familiarize them with the structures from a paragraph and sentence level. Then, grammatical features are introduced through authentic texts of varying content (in order to appeal to various learner interests). Some explicit grammatical instruction is included, but in such cases, focused practice on the texts involved would soon follow. While the texts themselves will determine the order in which certain grammatical features will be presented, the entire module is "designed to spiral back to the grammar features of each discourse type (p. 1).
At the time of publication, Jennifer Mullins was an instructor of ESL at the International Language Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a graduate student in the master's program in the Department of Applied Linguistics & ESL at Georgia State University.
Included in her article are several helpful references to sources for activities, research in the area of past time narrative and teaching in context, and also sources for authentic texts. They can be linked directly from here:
"By providing students with examples of authentic texts, and then focusing on specific grammatical features that occur in those texts, we are presenting together those features which they will encounter together and which ultimately they will need to produce together to create meaningful texts of their own" (p. 3).
This is an eloquent summary of the working philosophy behind this article. It should be of good use to those wishing to quote Mullins on the importance of teaching in context.
1) This article contains many activities which may be of use to groups working with student informants in the TSLP 846 class in order to gauge their knowledge of past-time narrative.
Carrell, P. (1984). Evidence of a formal schema in second language comprehension. Language Learning, 34, 87-112.
Carrell's study begins by discussing how general comprehension of a text is influenced by the "overall suprasentential or rhetorical organization of a text" (p. 87). The schema that one may have for the overall organization of a text - in this case, a narrative - is called a "formal schema." Carrell tests the effects of narrative structure on reading recall in ESL learners.
According to Carrell, narrative structures consist of a setting plus an event structure which in turn consists of temporally connected episodes. Each episode contains a beginning, development and ending. Moreover, the Development consists of a reaction and a goal path, which in turn consists of an attempt and an outcome (p. 90). Carrell purports that such a "story schema may also be thought of as a set of expectations about stories, about the units of which they are composed, the way those units fit together" (p. 90).
Using 40 ESL students, Carrell devised an experiment to test the learners' recall with two different texts - both organized according to the structure above. Then the two texts were "interleaved" to make them into one story, so that this interleaved text had two settings, two event structures, etc. Half of these students read the standard version while the other half read the interleaved version. In the results of this study, Carrell found that "the quantity of recall was enhanced when the story was structured with a rhetorical organization that conformed to the reader's schema for simple stories" (p. 103). She also found that, during recall, students recalled the interleaved version in much the same structure as the group who recalled the standard version. That is, both groups recalled the ideal, or standard chronology of the story regardless of how it was written.
"Second language acquisition can be viewed, in part, as the process of acquiring appropriate new formal and content schemata and of learning to instantiate or activate the appropriate schema during comprehension" (p. 104).
This quote provides a nice summary of the theory that motivated this study. In teaching English in context, it appears that schema plays a large role in how a text will be comprehended, which affects the acquisition of grammar, as well.
1) This study suggests that students have a "formal schema" for narrative structures, which influences how they will interpret and recall narratives.
2) Carrell's schema for a "simple story line" (taken from Mandler, 1978) is similar to that of Bardovi-Harlig's (1992) foreground-background dichotomy and also Schiffrin's (1981) analysis of story structures. It provides yet another paradigm to our understanding of narrative structures.
3) Perhaps more research should be done into comparative analyses of formal narrative structures across languages. If formal schema plays such a large role, then perhaps that will affect the ways in which we teach with authentic materials, for we may have to explicitly develop formal schema along with grammatical and sentential features of the text.
Bardovi-Harlig. (1992). The telling of a tale: Discourse structure and tense use in learners' narratives. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 3, 144-161.