Narrative Structure and Tense Use in the Narrative Genres of Korean EFL Learners

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to examine how Korean learners of English express temporal information and use the tense-aspect to report chains of events in their narrative discourse. Ten adults Korean learners of English participated (two intermediate-level and eight advanced-level learners). The participants were asked to produce a Korean-telling-story task first and then a English-telling-story task. Twenty oral narratives were collected and grounding analysis was performed on all narrative texts. The findings of the study revealed that Korean learners tended to use the past tense to express completed actions in the foreground and the non-past to comment on actions or to evaluate the events in the background. This supports that grounding of narrative discourse may influence the distribution of tense-aspect morphology. Further studies should observe the function of the background and its influence on tense-aspect in narratives with a large-scale data.