Narrative Analysis: An Analysis of Evaluative Devices in Chinese JFL Learners’ Oral Narratives

Abstract

Using the picture book “Frog, where are you?” (Mayer, 1969), this study investigated the frequency and linguistic forms of evaluative devices in narratives elicited from 29 Japanese native speakers and 28 upper-intermediate Chinese learners of Japanese. The findings show that the preferred evaluative devices style differed between Japanese native speakers’ and Chinese learners’ narratives. On the one hand, although Japanese native speakers provided more evaluative devices than Chinese learners of Japanese, the ratio of evaluative clause and evaluative expression was approximately 2:8 in the narratives of both. On the other hand, Japanese native speakers provided evaluative clauses from the characters’ perspectives to create multiple-voiced discourse, and used evaluative expressions such as modality expressions of value judgments to objectify the narration. To the contrary, Chinese learners of Japanese mainly provided information supplements in narrating event clauses, durative-descriptive clauses, and evaluative clauses, adding the expressivity of the language in narratives to ensure that the communication intentions were perceived by the audience.