earticle

영어

In literature, the term “oral narrative task” refers to short narrative stories which participants, typically in a speaking exam, orally produce based on a sequence of picture prompts that are visually presented to them. This study investigated three major attributes of Korean EFL learners’ speaking performance in their oral narrative tasks, namely oral fluency (e.g., speech rate), syntactic complexity (ratio of subordinate clauses to main clauses), and lexical diversity (type-to- token ratio). We focused on examining whether and to what extent Korean EFL learners’ proficiency and the structure of the oral narrative tasks that they are involved in influence their story-telling performance as indexed by the above-mentioned three attributes. To this end, we made use of three sets of picture-cued story telling tasks, differing from each other in terms of task structure. The tasks were performed by a total of 44 (24 female, 20 male) Korean undergraduate students (26 high-level vs. 18 low-level proficiency) as they participated in an English speaking test. Their spoken responses from the test were orthographically and phonemically transcribed and subsequently analyzed using computerized procedures. Overall, the results suggest that the proficiency and task structure factors significantly influenced several fluency measures, but the role of the same factors was limited in the participants’ use of syntactically complex sentences and the diversity of vocabulary that they employed in the story-telling tasks. Implications of the findings for Korean EFL learners’ characteristics of oral performance in their narrative tasks are discussed.