Does Focused Teaching of NP Elaboration Enhance Young Learners’ Narrative Writing Competence in English as a Second Language?

Abstract

In the present investigation, 30 students in grade 4 (aged 10-11) within the Swedish school system were, with intervals of two weeks, asked to compose three narrative texts in L2 English. With the aim of enhancing their narrative writing skills, the learners received explicit teaching of NP (noun phrase) elaboration (both pre- and post-modification) prior to the first two texts, whereas no such instruction was offered before the third story. Two control groups, one writing in Swedish (L1) and one writing in English (L2), neither being offered treatment before doing so, were also incorporated. Despite some initial problems, the results show that the treatment the learners received enhanced their narrative writing skills in a number of ways. Text 3, in contrast to Text 1, does not only display an increase in text length, but also a growth in the number of post-modifying prepositional phrases and relative clauses (the latter primarily having general discourse functions but also narrative discourse functions), as well as an increase in NP and VP coordination, all being signs of more advanced narrative writing.