Story-retelling by students after listening to stories being read is found to be effective in promoting early literacy and language skills. However, story-reading and story-retelling have neither been part of bedtime stories to pre-school children nor significant part in our national curriculum for nursery schools. Research on retelling has been divided into language-based studies and psychology-based studies. Language-based studies (researchers such as Morrow, Kalmbach, Tindal, Goodman) use retelling to inquire into comprehension skill, enhance literacy development for young children and as a tool for language assessment. Psychology-based studies (researchers such as Dudukovic, Marsh, Tversky, Barber) use retelling to investigate how memory works. In addition, retelling for EFL learners has not been explored as much as in ELL setting.
The present study is a language-based study and psychology-based study. It investigates retelling to discover a young EFL leaner’s understanding of the stories based on Narrative Structure and his ability to memorize the events of the story by analyzing his oral retelling transcription. The EFL learner is quite fluent in English but not exposed to a lot of stories when he was in his pre-school years.
The findings show that he could only produce certain stages and units of Narrative Structure well. Based on the single lexical items that he reproduced, he could remember well when the main characters are related with interesting characters, objects or events. Repetitive events are recalled when the objects are different and when there is another different event happening between the two similar events. |