Connectivity in Written Personal and Fictional Narratives: The Study of Iranian EFL Learners and Native Speakers of Persian and English

The present study aimed to examine the use of different levels of syntactic architecture in written personal and fictional narratives in both Persian and English across three discourse communities, namely Persian native speakers, English native speakers, and Iranian EFL learners. To this end, the participants of the study were selected based on convenience sampling and were asked to write one of their happiest memories. Also, an English fable from Aseop's fables and a Persian story, chosen based on comparative literature and having the similar plot, were given to them to read and write whatever they remembered; there was no limit on the number of words and paragraphs. To analyze the data, the Berman and Nir-Sagiv's (۲۰۰۹) model was followed. The findings showed that in fictional narratives written by both Persian and English native speakers, isotaxis, asymmetric parataxis, complement (CMP), and parataxis levels were frequently employed; however, personal narratives in Persian were dominantly isotactic, paratactic, and asymmetric paratactic, CMP, while isotactic, hypotactic, and paratactic levels were frequent in English written personal narratives. Also, after receiving explicit instruction on different types of English sentences, the use of adverbial and relative clauses (hypotaxis level) increased in Iranian EFL learners' written narratives. It can be concluded that explicit teaching of syntactic levels enabled EFL learners to arrange their sentences correctly to express their intended meaning. Teachers can benefit from the results to gain a more comprehensive understanding of narrative connectivity and help EFL learners elaborate clause linkage in their written narrative tasks.

کلیدواژه ها:

syntactic architecture ، personal narrative ، fictional narrative ، parataxis ، hypotaxis ، isotaxis