English Narratives Research Articles

The language of stories: Modelling East African fiction and oral narratives

Few corpus-based studies have looked at the linguistic features that co-create narrative focus in a text. In this article, a corpus-based narrativity model with four feature groups is proposed that reflects the underlying structure of narratives: Agency, contextualisation, evaluation and causation. Agents affect events or are in turn affected by them; events are contextualised in space and time; the affective impact is reflected by evaluative language; and cause and effect give the narrative momentum. The aim was to illustrate how the narrativity model could be used to identify and map linguistic features associated with narratives in a corpus of East African English. A quantitative approach was followed to analyse and compare East African English fiction and oral narratives. The four feature groups included 16 linguistic features and WordSmith Tools 4.0 was used for the analyses. The results show that eight linguistic features frequently co-occur in fiction and oral narratives. However, some of the features are more frequent in fiction, whereas others are typical of oral narratives. First, fiction and oral narratives are discussed independently and then these registers are compared. Overall, the model is sufficiently robust to identify texts with a narrative focus.

‘Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble’: What are the Conjunctural Effects on English Teacher Professional Memories, Identities and Narratives?

This article explores how circumstances in different conjunctures influence the types of narrative, working practice and ‘Professional Memory’ that English teachers construct. It is argued that the circumstances in which teachers begin their careers help to formulate attitudes, values and missions that remain potent over long periods. Examining these phenomena from a collectivist perspective makes it possible to uncover the valued ways of working and conceptions of ‘English’ that different generations hold through professional memory. These memories can provide much needed, alternative accounts of the subject that are both informative and instructive. Here, I concentrate on the professional memory of one generation of English teachers who began in a distinctive conjuncture: 1965–1975.

Transforming Captivity Narratives in Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009)

Indian captivity narrative genre, or of non-Indians held by Indians, has long been described establishing both a triumphalist narrative of national progress and a template for American identity, in contrast with American Indian identity.1 As often noted, the Indian captivity narrative is marked by its perpetual metamorphosis, well its status as the archetype of American culture, or its foundation text.2 Richard Slotkin, in his trilogy on the myth of the American frontier, traces the critical function of the captivity narrative, alongside the story of the Indian fighter, in the development of the colonial project and then national ideology beginning in the seventeenth century. two figures of the frontier myth that Slotkin identifies-the captive and the Indian fighter-were codified and systematized in James Fenimore Cooper's nineteenth-century frontier romances and have persisted in various permutations through popular literature, theater, art, and film to the present day.3 While political exigencies informed those permutations, so did cultural confrontation. Focusing in particular on the key roles of gender and familial relations in the genre, June Namias concludes, The popularity of the captive story came from a fascination with both the other and the self. One's own culture, one's own family, one's own gender, that whole complex of Anglo-American culture one inherited by being raised on the American continent, was brought into relief.4 captivity narrative prompted such reflection, argues Joshua David Bellin, and exhibited in a multiplicity of ways the intercultural exchanges that pro- duced the narrative in the first place.5 Its descendants in literature and in film, for all of their revisions to the historical antecedents, nonetheless carry forward the record of exchange between American Indians and white captives and combatants.Running parallel yet counter to the Indian captivity narrative tradition are accounts of American Indians held captive, or what have been termed captivity narratives.6 In the context of colonial negotiations, warfare, Christian evangelism, and educational institutions, American Indians were repeatedly interned by Euro-Americans determined to exert political-geographical control and to expunge Native culture, particularly through forced English literacy. resulting as-told-to and autobiographical narratives in English stand echoes, revisions, and even inversions of the Indian captivity narrative. Alumni of the federal boarding school system, such Francis La Fleshe (Omaha), Zitkala-Sa (Dakota), Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), recount with deep emotion and sharp irony the physical and psychological pain they suffered in the process of acculturation. They also celebrate Native students' strategies to assert independence, express individuality, develop leadership, use Native languages, and undermine federal goals of homogenization and assimilation.7 Thus, the reverse captivity narrative, like its foil, takes up questions of individual survival, cultural identity, and national membership.What happens when the reverse captivity narrative, like the Indian captivity narrative before it, makes its way into other genres, especially film? Does the filmic adaptation of the boarding school narrative echo or depart from the adaptation of the captivity narrative? More specifically, how does the reverse captivity narrative brought to film animate the genre's central concern with linguistic colonialism? And how does the Western-a genre grounded in archetypal struggle between savagery and civilization but perpetually revised since the mid-twentieth century to reflect the violence of US settler colonialism and imperialism8-continue to evolve in the context of American Indians' experience in captivity? In this essay, I begin to answer these questions by focusing on a recent independent film that productively, provocatively embraces the intertextuality of both the Indian captivity and the reverse captivity narratives and their role in the construction-and deconstruction-of a mythic West. …

Event Classification in Foreign Language Aviation Reports

When adverse aviation events occur, narrative reports describing the events and their associated flights provide a valuable record for improving safety. Manual examination of large collections of such reports is challenging. Tools for automated event classification (assignment of type labels to individual reports) can help to mitigate this challenge. While several studies have developed and systematically empirically evaluated event classification tools on English aviation narratives, we are not aware of any that have done the same on foreign language narratives. We developed and implemented an approach for event classification based on Bayesian logistic regression and a novel feature selection technique. For comparison purposes, we also implemented an approach described in the literature. We collected and annotated a corpus of Japanese aviation incident reports, as well as, a corpus of French incident reports. We carried out a series of experiments comparing the accuracy of our approach and the other approach.

A Readability Evolution of Narratives in Annual Reports

Previous research on the readability of annual reports is based mainly on English narratives and has found them difficult to read. Although the results of such research cannot be generalized to different contexts, accounting narratives written in non-English languages have seldom been analyzed in this respect. More important, few studies have longitudinally examined the evolution in readability of such narratives. This study focuses on the readability evolution of annual report narratives written in Spanish, applying an adapted version of the Flesch readability formula to two sets of documents from different companies over most of the years of the 20th century. The results confirm that the reports are indeed difficult to read but show an improvement in readability over the years. The study tested several variables that might influence readability, including profitability.

Error Analysis in Writing an English Narrative Composition

The purpose of the research were to know the errors which have been made by the learners in their English narrative composition and it is also to know why they made the errors, to identify the errors made by the learners, to correct the errors, to improve the teaching quality which is appropriate with the curriculum and the syllabus and to get the data and the explanation about the difficulties in studying English especially in writing the English narrative composition. The method used in this research is descriptive method. Descriptive method means the method which tries to give thedata and the explanation about the recent symptoms. The data was taken from 20 students and it was taken by asking the learners to make the English narrative composition, classifying then analyzing the errors found in their composition.The errors that have been found in the compositions are 30 items or 15% for errors of selection, 25 items or 12, 5% for errors of ordering, 115 items or 57, 5% for errors of omission and 30 items or 15% for errors of addition. Some identifying, classifying, analyzing and correcting the errors have been done to correct the errors that have been found. It was done in order to minimize and avoid the same errors happen again in the learners’ English narrative composition.

Impersonal and generic reference: a cross-linguistic look at Finnish and English narratives

In linguistic communication, in addition to referring to specific, known referents, we also need to deal with unknown, generic or non-specific referents. I investigated how the English generic you and impersonal they compare to the Finnish zero person construction and impersonal passive, respectively. In the first part of this paper, I compare the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of these constructions, using examples from a range of sources. In the second part of this paper, I investigate how English generic you and impersonal they are translated into Finnish. As we will see, the differences in the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of these constructions mean that the translator sometimes has to opt for alternative constructions (such as first person expressions or generic nouns). A detailed analysis of these patterns sheds light on our understanding of these typologically different constructions, and contributes to our understanding of how reference to generic and impersonal entities is accomplished in language.

A comparative account of the interpretation of temporal relations in narrative in Vietnamese and English

This paper provides a comparative account of the interpretation of temporal relations in Vietnamese and English narrative, using a bi-directional corpus of 3,082 clauses of narrative passages originally written in Vietnamese and their English translations and 3,124 clauses of narrative passages originally written in English and their Vietnamese translations. It is shown that the principles for the interpretation of temporal relations between situations in narrative are similar for both English and Vietnamese despite the fact that English has a well-developed tense system, while Vietnamese is a widely-known tenseless language. The principles are based on the temporal properties of situation aspect and the discourse relations between the clauses, which are elicited from pragmatic inferences.

The Use of Narrative as a Speech Behaviour Model

Introduction To describe the attitude of a human towards the world, a subject uses various language forms which reveal inner reasons of his or her behavior. This is the unique character of relationships between a human and the world according to philosophical tradition today. Personal being includes social and individual practices in which human arguments about his or her actions, beliefs and desires are reflected. Narrative (in English and French narrative--a story-telling; in Latin narrare--to tell) refers to the concept characteristic for the postmodern philosophy, establishing a self-sentiment as a text being. The term is borrowed from the historiography where it emerged within the context of conception which explains the sense of a historical event not as a naturally determined story but as a sense arising in the context of narration about the event and immanently connected with its interpretation. Narrative approach in modern social sciences narrative turn in social sciences took place in the 80-s of the 20th century. From the point of view of a turn, it is possible to understand the functioning of different forms of knowledge if to view them from a narrative perspective and with realization of significance of narrative in the life of a human [5]. In 1905 a philosopher L. Shestov wrote: If a human found the words to express his attitude to the world, he has a right to speak and he can be listened to, and his attitude is unique which we never met before and it will never occur again. L. Shestov criticized natural-science methodology and stated: Only alternating events are worth the attention of science, these events may be created artificially, if desired, missing a huge amount of single facts. Referring to narrative, we realize that 'single events tell us a lot more than constantly recurring ones' [9]. Narrative in philosophy is interpreted as a way for a human to acquire his identity. In a narrative a story-teller objectifies his own subjectivity. Narrative is not only a means of self-identification but also a way to reach certain social aims. Today narrative is in the spotlight of narratology, social and humanitarian and natural sciences. Specialists in the narratology (J.M. Adam, G. Genette, Th. Pavel, Sh. RimmonKenan, G. Prince etc.) explain the number of studies by the fact that narration in the life of people is becoming more important. Disregarding material and symbolic ways, people are communication verbally. A linguistic product, or discourse is the result of this communication. The results of the study include not only literary texts and everyday language but a scientific discourse as well: musicology (E. Nuke), literary texts (W. Steiner) and film studies (K. Metz) analyze composition and representation; cultural studies study the ways for obtaining legitimation by the authorities through narrative (F. Jameson); in psychology, narratology explanatory schemes are used for studying the memory and cognition (N. Sten, K. Glenn); philosophy and sociology study conventions of narrative to define a rhetorical nature of scientific texts (R. Rorty, E. Gross). Narrative approach in social sciences today implies the presence of in all the areas of human relationships despite certain functional differences:--in psychology narrative helps to understand the identity; in history narratives give a sense to the past; in psychological analysis this is the material for analyzing things; in philosophy narratives are the base for forming a new vision pf the world and organizing communities [13]; in sociology narratives combine all the characteristics of a good methodology--narrative approach in modern social sciences implies a universal character for telling the stories [12]. It means that narrative serves as a form of a human behavior or other social actions which occur under certain conditions and are oriented towards the others. …

Suppression and Working Memory in Auditory Comprehension of L2 Narratives: Evidence from Cross-Modal Priming.

Using a cross-modal priming task, the present study explores whether Chinese-English bilinguals process goal related information during auditory comprehension of English narratives like native speakers. Results indicate that English native speakers adopted both mechanisms of suppression and enhancement to modulate the activation of goals and keep track of the "causal path" in narrative events and that L1 speakers with higher working memory (WM) capacity are more skilled at attenuating interference. L2 speakers, however, experienced the phenomenon of "facilitation-without-inhibition." Their difficulty in suppressing irrelevant information was related to their performance in the test of working memory capacity. For the L2 group with greater working memory capacity, the effects of both enhancement and suppression were found. These findings are discussed in light of a landscape model of L2 text comprehension which highlights the need for WM to be incorporated into comprehensive models of L2 processing as well as theories of SLA.

Total Extraperitoneal Repair of Inguinal Hernia: Case Report of a Single 7-mm Port Needle-Assisted Procedure

Abstract Introduction: Total extraperitoneal repair (TEP) has become a popular technique for inguinal hernia repair.1,2 The minimal invasive technique has multiple benefits such as less postoperative pain and reduced length of hospital stay.3–5 We present a case of a TEP inguinal hernia repair with one reusable 7-mm port assisted by a (Veress) needle. Materials and Methods: We selected a patient with a small medial inguinal hernia of the left side and a low body–mass index (BMI; 20.15 kg/m2); previous history only showed an open Lichtenstein inguinal repair of the right side. We used one reusable 7-mm port and a Veress needle as a dissecting tool. We present a video of the procedure describing every detailed aspect, from an inside and outside view. The run time of the video is 4 minutes and 47 seconds. The video is accompanied by English narration. Results: The procedure was performed safely, swiftly, and uneventfully with the 7-mm port and a blunt Veress needle (24 minutes operating time). Postoperative ...

Tapping into the Worlds of the Target Language: A Re-Examination of L2 Learning

This article draws on Nelson Goodman's work on world-making to re-examine second-language (L2) learning. It examines Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' experience of L2 learning and use, with the aim of understanding their interaction with the relevant linguistic and sociocultural worlds. The results show that L2 learners make sense of foreign concepts by tapping into a new sociocultural world. On the other hand, learners' L1 worlds play an active role in their L2 use and learning; they provide linguistic resources and are particularly helpful for learning when the L2 is used to describe learners' familiar L1 experiences. Our experiment showed that Chinese EFL learners benefited in specific ways from their study of Chinese writers' narratives in English, and were becoming more ready to accept multiple models—native-speaking and indigenous—for their L2 learning.

THE POETICS OF APOLOGY

This article surveys the Far East prisoner of war novel from its inception in English public school narratives and racially inflected character profiles to the more critically engaged publications of the last two decades. During the latter period, linear reconstructions of imprisonment, analogous institutional paradigms, and authors' own memories of captivity have gradually declined in influence. Although not wholly absent, their place has been taken by an emphasis on intergenerational trauma, international relations (especially those involving the 1995 commemoration of the end of the war), and real or imagined meetings between surviving prisoners and their former torturers or interrogators. Through a close reading of journalist Jim Lehrer's novel The Special Prisoner (2000), this essay examines the ways in which international relations inflect an imagined encounter between a surviving prisoner and his former torturer. The novelist's sensitivity to contending notions of collective guilt and collective victimhood serve to illustrate the complications that arise at the individual level when forgiveness is freely offered by a trauma survivor and roundly rejected by the agent of that trauma.

This is our land: Land and identity in selected Zimbabwean black- and white-authored fictional narratives in English published between 2000 and 2010

This article analyses post-2000 Zimbabwean black- and white-authored fictional narratives’ depictions of land and identity against the backdrop of the socio-political and economic crises resulting from the post-2000 land occupations. The process and phase that provide the background to both fictional narratives and their criticism have been canonised as jambanja across the racial divide. Far removed in time and space, these Zimbabwean- authored fictional narratives form an essential socio-historical record of the post-2000 Zimbabwean land experiences. Critical attention appears to ignore the socio-cultural-historical contexts, issues that the selected fictional narratives partially address. The socio-economic and historical accounts of Zimbabwe's embittered land experiences have also been mainly racial and exclusionary. This article interrogates whether writers’ trajectories suggest practicable systems, structures, approaches and practices that genuinely respect common humanity and the imperative to safeguard human dignity. Using Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentric ‘Location theory’ to situate texts as well as their criticism within the context in which they are generated and developed, the article analyses writers’ creativity—motifs, meaning, language, attitude, direction and vision—within the Zimbabwean socio-cultural- historical experiences. This integrative approach is envisaged to establish common ground and humwe (‘oneness/ togetherness’) through literature so that Zimbabweans can hold constructive dialogues on the post-2000 land and identity issues.

Amplifying Women's Intelligence through Travel: Inna's Tale in ‘The Booroom Slave’ (1828) by Sarah Bowdich

Sarah Bowdich’s story 'The Booroom Slave' has elicited little critical attention except in recent studies mainly investigating the black and white lithograph that accompanied its first publication in the 'Forget Me Not' Gift Book in 1828. This article, however, focuses specifically on the text as an important tale of travel enhanced by its various strategic retellings. In 'The Booroom Slave', Inna first recounts her traumatic capture, journey to coastal slave markets, and escape through a male African interpreter when she meets the tale's (English) narrator, who then retranslates Inna’s journey and its consequences for her literate readers. But this double telling of travel within the story is also matched by the two-fold iterations of the whole. It was similarly recast by male interpreters when reprinted in America in 1829 in 'The African Repository and Colonial Journal'. Sarah Bowdich then reshaped it in 1835 for her 'Stories from Strange Lands' by adding extensive footnotes elucidating its West African references from her own travel experience of 1816. By exploring these parallel, doubly reframed, female travel narrations, this article argues that 'The Booroom Slave' offers a critique of the limitations of the British/European civilising mission that was unusually far-seeing not only for the early nineteenth century, but also for the tale's postcolonial afterlives.

INDONESIA’S INTERFERENCE IN TRANSLATING TEXT INTO ENGLISH TEXT

This research is aimed: (1) to reveal that interference of Indonesian language interrupt when the students at the sixth semester of FKIP in Muhammadiyah University of Mataram translate the English narrative past tense text; (2) to know the kinds of factors interrupted the students’ in translating English narrative the text. The population of study were students in FKIP Muhammadiyah University of Mataram. They consist of three classes from class A to C. The number of the population was 64 students so, the writer took only the 17 students as the samples, by using purposive sampling technique. The results of the research showed that: (1) among 17 students in class A do some interferences, they have less ability to construct the translation target text into the accuracy, acceptable and understandable/ readable sentences by the reader. Moreover, there are two main Indonesian interference found by the researcher, they were morphological interference by misunderstanding of using past tense sentences and syntactical interference by unstructured sentence in the target text, (2) The students’ only could get the range from 4 scores to 8 scores, where 5 students get very poor, 4 students get poor, 2 students get fair, 3 students get fairly good, 3 students get good. The students’ translation percentage for each standard such as accuracy is 16,5%, acceptable is 10,11%, readability is 5,47% and for total all of the students’ mean score is 51,9%, where it took on poor score of translation (3) There are 4 factors made the students difficult to translate the target text, they were 1. Disloyalty of the speakers and receiver 2 Insufficient of vocabulary in translating the source language into the target language, 3. The prestige of the source language and style, 4. Daily habits in the mother tongue influence target text, (4) The students’ translations result are 6 students got score of 0-3 namely very low level, 6 students got score of 5,5-6,5, who categorized as the low level, 2 students got the range score of 6,6-7,5, who categorized “sufficient level”, there are 3 students got this “high level” with the range score of 7,6-9,5, and no one getting the “highest level” score in the range of 9,6-10.

Dual language intervention for bilinguals at risk for language impairment.

Selecting the initial language of intervention for bilingual children at risk for language impairment is challenging for clinicians, as both the home and academic languages are important for children's successful communication. In this project, six Spanish-English bilingual first graders at risk for language impairment participated in an 8-week intervention program targeting vocabulary, morphosyntax, narrative, and literacy skills in both Spanish and English. Children completed 24 small-group sessions (three times a week). One group received Spanish intervention first, then English, and another group received English first, then Spanish. The systematic use of both languages in intervention resulted in overall gains in vocabulary and narrative skills in this short-term intervention. Language condition groups differed in performance on oral narratives and semantics. Clinical recommendations for selecting the initial language of intervention are discussed.

Improve Students’ Narrative Writing Achievement Through Film at SMA NEGERI I PALIPI

This study attempted to improve students’ English Narrative writing achievement through Film. The objective of study was to find out whether film can improve students’ achievement in writing Narrative Paragraphs. This study was conducted by applying classroom action research which was done in 6 meeting of their English subject. The subject of this study was the second year students (XI –IPA – 2) of SMA Negeri 1 Palipi - Samosir Indonesia. One class was taken as the subject of the study. The number of the students was 30 students. The data of this research were obtained in two cycles, namely cycle 1 and cycle 2. Each cycle consisted of the four steps of an action Research: planning, action, observation and reflection. The instrument for collecting data used writing test from students’ paper writing to write the film talk about as writing tests for the quantitative data and used diary notes, questionnaire sheet, observation sheet and interview for the qualitative data. Based on the writing test result, the students’ score kept improving in every test. The findings indicated that the using of film as a media of learning improved students’ writing achievement. The students’ score significant was improved; the mean of second cycle i.e. 84.3 was higher than the mean of the first cycle i.e. 76.1. Based on diary notes, questionnaire sheet, observation sheet and interview, it was found that teaching learning process ran well. The conclusion was that using of film as a media of learning improved students’ writing achievement.

China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing (1644–1911) by Anthony E. Clark (review)

Reviewed by: China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing (1644–1911) by Anthony E. Clark Gail King China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing (1644–1911). By Anthony E. Clark. [Studies in Missionaries and Christianity in China.] (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2011. Pp. xvi, 270. $39.99 paperback. ISBN 978-1-61146-145-9.) Little has been written on China’s Catholic Christian martyrs in English, particularly those from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially the Chinese martyrs, for whom scarce documentation exists even in Chinese. Hence this volume supplies a noticeable lack in information about Catholic Christian martyrs in China and is a welcome addition to the field. Clark discusses methodology in the introduction, emphasizing the need to give an account that takes seriously the martyrs’ religious faith while observing academic objectivity. What he hopes to achieve, he states, is to retell the history of Catholic martyrs in China “… with equal respect for both the motives of martyrdom [End Page 184] and for the scholarly works that describe it” (p. 3). He notes the difficulties of dealing with the available sources—Chinese and Western, secular and religious. Chapter 1 is a very useful discussion of how the concept of Christian martyrdom was explained to Chinese Christians. Although in Western usage the word martyr is always understood to include the idea of being a witness for the faith, there is no Chinese equivalent of this concept. Martyrdom was mostly understood negatively in traditional Chinese society because once dead, a son could no longer carry out the sacrifices to the family or to his ancestors. Taught the Christian meaning of martyrdom, Chinese Christian martyrs died as witnesses and also believing that their death would lead them to a paradise very different from the bleak afterlife of the Chinese traditional view. Chapter 2 gives an overview of Catholic Christianity in China beginning with the legend of St. Thomas, the Nestorians of the Tang Dynasty, the Franciscans of the thirteenth century, the Jesuits and their arrival at the end of the sixteenth century with their accommodative approach and concern for Chinese culture, and the Rites Controversy. The chapter ends with a short overview of the Boxer Uprising and a review of the attitude of the Chinese Communists toward Christianity when the People’s Republic of China was established, foreshadowed by the killing of the monks at the monasteries of Our Lady of Consolation and Our Lady of Joy in 1947. Chapters 3 through 6 tell the stories of the martyrs, beginning with the Dominicans, then Jesuits, then Franciscans, and then martyrs from other missions. For each martyr, Clark summarizes what is known (which, for some of the Chinese Christians, is very little) and gives the background and events of their martyrdom. His decision to discuss the martyrs by religious order is probably due to the fact that China was evangelized by religious orders that were given the right to work in certain areas, and their priest missionaries were the ones who watched over the flocks in those areas. Still, a brief explanation of why this way of organizing the book was chosen would have been helpful. Otherwise, it seems, the religious order really has no connection with the fact of martyrdom, especially in the Boxer Uprising. This is a well-crafted book that provides the first English narrative of most of these martyrdoms. The inclusion of the controversy that erupted after Pope Saint John Paul II canonized the 100 martyrs on October 1, 2000, shows that the cultural differences and misunderstandings that lay at the roots of many of the martyrdoms in the earlier centuries still exist. [End Page 185] Gail King Brigham Young University Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

A Taiwanese Mandarin Main Concept Analysis (TM-MCA) for quantification of aphasic oral discourse.

Various quantitative systems have been proposed to examine aphasic oral narratives in English. A clinical tool for assessing discourse produced by Cantonese-speaking persons with aphasia (PWA), namely Main Concept Analysis (MCA), was developed recently for quantifying the presence, accuracy and completeness of a narrative. Similar tools for Mandarin speakers are currently absent. The first aim is to develop and establish the validity of the Taiwanese Mandarin Main Concept Analysis (TM-MCA) for the Mandarin-speaking population in Taiwan, given the paucity of related investigations. Another aim is to establish the influence of age and education level on Taiwanese Mandarin speakers' oral narrative abilities. The third purpose is to examine how well the TM-MCA could distinguish between native speakers with and without aphasia in Taiwan. The final aim is to examine the reliability and validity of the TM-MCA. Eight speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and eight neurologically intact participants were involved to establish the TM-MCA main concepts. Another 36 neurologically intact participants and 10 PWA participated to validate the TM-MCA by contrasting their performance. Both age and educational level affected the oral discourse performance among the neurologically intact adults. Significant differences on the TM-MCA measures were noted between the control group and the group with aphasia. Moreover, the degree of aphasia significantly affected the oral discourse of PWA. The TM-MCA is a culturally appropriate quantitative system for the Taiwanese Mandarin population. It can be used to supplement standardized aphasia tests to help SLPs make more informative decisions not only on clinical diagnosis but also on treatment planning.