Telling an expressive narrative in a foreign language

Abstract This study explores the discourse expressivity of Chinese JFL (Japanese as a foreign language) learners’ Japanese narratives in terms of the variety and use of evaluative strategies, and analyzes how the evaluation system in their first language (L1) may be evident in their second language (L2) performance. For this reason, using the wordless picture book Frog, where are you? , we examined the oral narratives produced by adult Japanese native speakers, adult Chinese native speakers, and Chinese JFL learners. The findings suggest that the absence of “utterance attitudes” in the Chinese-language narratives is evident in the Japanese-language narratives of the Chinese JFL learners; thus, the evaluation of JFL stories is somewhat more direct, and the stories are easier to understand than those of adult JNS. However, the evaluations of the Chinese JFL learners’ narratives also diverged from those of the adult CNS in the direction of the target language’s norms.