Differences in linguistic and discourse features of narrative writing performance

The research presented in this paper aimed to investigate the linguistic and discourse characteristics of narratives produced by student-teachers in an ELT department. Thirty-four students from the ELT Department of Inonu University participated in the study. Each was asked to write two stories about an experience in which they were made angry (in English) and an experience in which they made someone angry (in Turkish). A total of 68 narrative texts were collected. Using concordance software the number of types and tokens and the type-token ratio were calculated; and each sentence in the text was rated as simple, coordinate, complex and coordinate+complex by the researcher to reveal the syntactic richness. The analyses suggest that although the participants’ Turkish texts are richer than the English ones in terms of lexical richness, there is high parallelism between the texts in terms of syntactic richness. We believe that relatively poor vocabulary in the target language is the main reason for participants to prefer writing in their native language.