Temporal adverbs as structuring devices in narratives of multilingual students
Language development of adolescents and in particular of multilingual adolescents to date does not get the attention it deserves. This contribution gives a brief overview of what later language development means and aims at highlighting some of its features in personal experience narratives written by mono- and multilingual secondary school students. To this end, concepts of narrative structure will also be reviewed briefly. Then a closer look will be taken at the use of the temporal adverbial ‘dann’ (‘then’). This adverbial allows verbalising specific aspects of the event structure in relation to narrative structure. Students display different degrees of convergence with target language patterns of use. The discussion then centres on in how far this is a developmental issue and/or can be traced back to multilingualism. Regarding the latter no clear tendency can be found.
Article outline
- Introduction
- On structure and function of narratives
- Narrative development in the context of later language development
- Study design and data
- Some background on temporal expressions in sample narratives
- Positioning of ‘dann’ in texts by adolescent students
- Discussion
- Conclusion
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Notes
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References