Ágnes Albert

Stories students tell

Creativity and oral narrative task performance of English majors in Hungary

Empirical research on narrative tasks

Empirical research on oral narrative tasks started in the 1990s. Pauline Foster and Peter Skehan conducted a series of studies, later referred to as the Ealing research (Skehan & Foster, 2012), on different task types with a range of properties implemented under various conditions, and one of the investigated task types was oral narratives. The narrative task used in the first of these studies (Foster & Skehan, 1996) involved making up a storyline from five loosely but obviously connected pictures and sharing the story with a partner. The authors attempted to rank the three task types used in this study (personal information exchange, narrative, and decision making) on a scale of difficulty proposed by Skehan (1996) and judged the narrative task to be of medium difficulty. The empirical findings showed, however, that a one-dimensional notion of task difficulty is unable to handle the fact that tasks may differ along a number of dimensions. Thus, though with regard to fluency the narrative task seemed to be of medium difficulty, it elicited the most complex but the least accurate language from the respondents (Foster & Skehan, 1996).

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2021

ISBN: 978 963 454 669 6

Nyelvészet

This monograph presents research conducted in connection with the relationships between individual difference variables, like creativity and language aptitude, and the oral narrative task performance of first year English major university students. Changes in language instruction that involve greater reliance on learners' creativity imply that researching creativity as a potentially important individual variable should be imminent. The prominence of tasks in the classroom and in tests suggests that tasks and their decisive features leading to differences in task performance should also be investigated. The findings of the monograph contribute to a deeper understanding of how different individual differences contribute to oral narrative task performance on the one hand, and on the other, they shed light on the differential effects of task complexity. Therefore, the monograph might be of interest for researchers, course book writers and practising teachers alike.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/albert-stories-students-tell//

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