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FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

FOR HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Faculty of Humanities

DEVELOPING PRIMARY STUDENTS' DISCOURSE COMPETENCE BY MEANS OF STORYTELLING BACHELOR'S THESIS

Biktyakova Anna

Reviewer Professor Kolesnikova E. A.,

PhD, Associate Professor

Moscow, 2019



Contents

discourse competence communicative storytelling

Introduction

1. Theoretical Framework: Review of Literature

1.1 Discourse and its Typology

1.2 The Concept of Discourse Competence and its Role as a Component of Communicative Competence

1.3 The Specifics of Primary Students' Discourse Competence

1.4 Benefits of Storytelling and Storytelling as a Tool of Developing Spoken Discourse Competence

Conclusions on Chapter 1

2. Practical Part: Procedure Design

2.1 Primary Students' Textbooks Analysis

2.2 The Procedure for Developing Primary Students' Spoken Discourse Competence via Storytelling

Conclusions on Chapter 2

Conclusion

References

Appendix



Introduction

Various processes of globalisation, such as the establishment of international relations among countries, the exchange of cultural and scientific experience, the rapid development of technologies, have led to the increase in the role of foreign languages and to the reorientation of needs (goals) of foreign language teaching. A significant milestone in the history of foreign language teaching was marked by the introduction of the concepts of competency (Chomsky, 1965) and communicative competence (Hymes, 1972). Further studies of communicative competence development, which is considered today as one of the ultimate goals of foreign language education (Canale and Swain, 1980; Savignon, 1983; Passov, 1989, and others), resulted in a shift of focus from content concerns to skills-based learning that allows effective intercultural communication. Consequently, new teaching approaches, methods and techniques have proliferated.

The subject matter of the present research is the development of primary students' discourse competence by means of the storytelling technique. To explain the importance of conducting this study, we need to shed light on three concepts - discourse competence, primary students (or young learners), and storytelling.

Discourse competence, according to some eminent linguists (Canale and Swain, 1980; Savignon, 1983, and others), is subsumed under communicative competence and can be defined as an ability to apply the knowledge of rules and norms of speech production and comprehension to creating a coherent and cohesive text from stretches of language (i.e. phrases, sentences). Furthermore, the Russian Federal State Educational Standards (FSES) Federal State Educational Standards (FSES) is an official state document which presents a set of compulsory requirements imposed by the state on all accredited Russian educational programmers of primary, basic general, secondary, secondary vocational and higher professional education. (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2009, No. 373) include the development of discourse competence as one of the prime requirements imposed on pupils at each level of foreign language school education (Mil'rud, 2013).

We chose primary students as the target group not without reason. Primary school education provides a solid foundation for the entire learning process and allows children to gain elementary, yet pivotal communicative competence, which implies the development of discourse competence along with other competences. Johnstone (2009) wrote about a dramatic worldwide increase in the number of English language learners in primary schools over the past three decades. This idea was reinforced by the following statistics revealed by Ellis and Brewster (2014), “Primary English language teaching now involves around half a billion children and six million teachers working in a wide range of contexts” (p. 3). What is more, the fact that school educational programmes in Russia still bristle with lessons oriented predominantly to the practice of grammar (which serves the basis of the skills: speaking, writing, listening, reading), but not to the acquisition of the skills themselves, should not be missed out. As a consequence of the aforementioned trends, new teaching techniques have sprung up, one of which is storytelling.

Storytelling has been regarded as a powerful mechanism for teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) (Wright, 2009; Ellis & Brewster, 2014, and others). In part, this is because young learners are used to listening to stories in their daily lives from an early age. In addition, stories expose children to a wide variety of authentic language and real-life situations, as well as to speech comprehension and production training. Therefore, the implementation of the storytelling technique in an English classroom seems to be a great strategy, particularly for enhancing discourse competence.

By this study, we aimed to demonstrate the use of stories for the development of primary students' spoken discourse competence. To this end, the following objectives had to be achieved in the course of the research:

1) To define the concept of discourse;

2) To carry out a study of the concept of discourse competence and to define its role as a component of communicative competence;

3) To identify the specifics of primary students' discourse competence;

4) To study the benefits of storytelling and to define its role as a tool of discourse competence development;

5) To analyse textbooks used in primary schools in order to determine whether they effectively provide storytelling activities to develop young learners' spoken discourse competence;

6) To design the procedure of using stories for the development of young learners' spoken discourse competence.

As for structural composition, the current research was split into two main parts: secondary (theoretical) and primary (empirical) research. The theoretical research consisted in reviewing the literature published by Russian and foreign linguists on the topic of discourse competence, the nature of primary students' discourse competence development and the technique of storytelling. Within the framework of the empirical research, we analysed primary students' textbooks and then designed the procedure for enhancing young learners' spoken discourse competence through the context of stories.

It is of the utmost importance to indicate a fundamental limitation of the study. Thus, the central focus was given to the development of spoken discourse competence (in particular, monologic narrative discourse). Meanwhile, listening and reading skills served as a context and model for speaking, thereby improving as well.

The findings of this research are expected to be of great practical value not only to primary school teachers of English but also to teacher trainers who seek to 'raise' well-qualified professionals. The designed story-based procedure for developing spoken discourse competence gives precise information on how to organise and use storybooks in order to foster the development of primary students' speaking skills. On a broader scale, this study might hopefully increase awareness of storytelling for academic purposes and stimulate its wider application to a foreign language classroom in primary schools. Finally, the results produced in the course of the research may encourage further extensive studies of this technique as a tool of children's speaking skills development, thus filling in the existing knowledge gap.

1. Theoretical Framework: Review of Literature

This study relates to the area that focuses on the development of young learners' spoken discourse competence with the help of storybooks.

1.1 Discourse and its Typology

To distil the essence of discourse competence, we first needed to define the concept of discourse. Discourse is “language in use, for communication” (Cook, 1989, p. 6). It may consist of one or several “well-formed grammatical sentences” and “can have grammatical `mistakes' in it, and often does” (Cook, 1989, p. 7). Thus, grammar serves only as a resource and does not require full compliance with its rules. In contrast, what plays a crucial role is discourse being perceived by listeners or readers as coherent.

Scholars have interpreted the term `discourse' in two ways:

I. Discourse is in contrast to a text which means a piece of language. Meanwhile, discourse implies the use of the language (Cameron, 2001) and includes information about:

ѕ The context of use (e.g. where and when the situation is happening);

ѕ The users of the text (by whom it was written, their social status, age, etc. depending on the context).

In other words, this meaning of discourse emphasises the context behind a certain text. To show a clearer difference between the terms `discourse' and `text', we could consider a shopping list. It will be perceived as a text if it means no more than a list of items to be purchased. However, for the shopping list to be interpreted as discourse, not just a text, we have to take into consideration the context in which this shopping list was written and think of the writer and the user of the text. So the following situation could be imagined: a woman created this shopping list not to forget which products to buy, she wrote it on a small piece of paper she wanted to take with her to the supermarket, or she made this shopping list for her husband who was supposed to go shopping so that he didn't need to learn all the foods and drinks enumerated in the list by heart.

II. Discourse is contrasted to a sentence. While the sentence comprises clauses which are broken down into phrases consisting of words, discourse is referred to as a piece of language expressed in larger units than the sentence. The examples of written discourse in this sense can be articles and books, whereas by spoken discourse in this meaning we can call conversations, stories, songs.

In her study, Lynne Cameron (2001) pointed out that both of the meanings of discourse are crucial for foreign language teaching whose ultimate aim is to raise competent foreign language learners being able to freely establish communication with native speakers. To this end, students need to know how language operates in different contexts, within longer stretches of text and talk and not solely in sentences.

Discourse Typology

Several types of discourse have been distinguished by foreign language teaching specialists.

I. According to the form of expression, discourse is classified into spoken (e.g. lessons, interviews, trials, lectures) and written. The spoken discourse has further given rise to the skills of speaking (production) and listening (reception), and the written discourse has been further divided into writing (production) and reading (receptive) skills (Cook, 1989).

The distinction between written discourse and spoken discourse though is not sharp, as there are intermediate discourse types in between. For instance, while relating to spoken discourse, plays are learnt from a script.

Spoken discourse may take the form of a monologue or a dialogue. Cameron (2001) described spoken discourse using two terms: conversation, which stands for dialogic discourse, and extended talk, which stands for monologic discourse. These two types of discourse vary in the skills needed to perform each of these discourses, “length of turns and degree of interaction” (Cameron, 2001, p. 52).

Monologic discourse is defined as a speech given by one person and characterised by being (Rogova & Vereshchagina, 1988; Solovova, 2006, and others):

ѕ Goal-oriented (problem-oriented);

ѕ Uninterrupted (continuous);

ѕ Expressive;

ѕ Logical;

ѕ Semantically complete;

ѕ Independent.

In the Russian methodology (Rogova & Vereshchagina, 1988; Solovova, 2006), according to the degree of independence, monologues are divided into reproductive, reproductive-productive and productive. According to the degree of preparedness, monologic discourse can be prepared, partly-prepared and unprepared.

What is more, the following types of monologues (talks) were distinguished (Brown & Yule, 1983):

· Narrative (storytelling) - a monologue, in which a speaker recounts the state of things or a series of events, generally in the same order as they took place, providing details about when and where they happened and who participated in them. Narratives have the following characteristic features:

– an exact theme on which the narrative is based;

– participants (primary, secondary roles);

– temporal sequencing of events;

– dynamics of actions: one event succeeds another, that other is followed by the next event so that several `images' throughout the narration are created;

– the structure is based on abstract (introduction to the story), orientation (the place, time, participants, and circumstances), complicating action (what happened), evaluation (how the story was developing next), resolution (how the problem was solved, the final action), coda (the connection between the story and the present narration) (McCarty & Carter, 1994; Cameron 2001).

· Description - a monologue in which a person describes simultaneous or permanent features of an object. The following features help distinguish this type of monologic discourse:

– the presence of the object described;

– the description is based on either the outer features (genres of description - a portrait, an interior, a landscape) or the inner features of objects (e.g. a person's character traits or behaviour patterns, material properties, etc.);

– a single time frame: the features are or were observed during a definite period of time, thus generally one verb tense is used throughout the description;

– the structure may include a general description of the object, which forms an overall impression of the object and recounts its basic features; a sequential listing of individual features; a value judgement.

· Opinion (or opinion-expressing) - a monologue in which a speaker expresses his or her opinion on a given topic, statement, quote or proverb, etc.

· Instruction - a monologue in which a speaker provides instructions on how to do a particular task (e.g. how to draw a diagram, or arrange a number of objects, etc.). Instructions may be given through the use of either imperative forms (e.g. “put the rod diagonally across the switches” (Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 47), or descriptive terms (with the Passive Voice) (e.g. “the rod is put diagonally across the switches” (Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 47).

Cameron (2001) also added a monologue-reasoning to the aforementioned classification, which can be defined as monologic discourse in which a speaker explains a fact, gives reasons for or against something and tries to reach conclusions. This speech generally has the following structure:

– statement of the main point which expresses the speaker's opinion (affirmation or negation);

– argumentation which proves the speaker's point of view or hypothesis;

– a logical conclusion.

Dialogic discourse stands for a speech which occurs between two interlocutors who take their turns. Russian methodologists (Rogova & Vereshchagina, 1988; Solovova, 2006) tend to single out:

· Free dialogues - dialogues in which the content and logic of discourse are not strictly fixed by social discourse roles (e.g. discussions, interviews, etc.);

· Standard dialogues - dialogues containing certain patterns with prescribed social roles which students need to follow according to the given task (e.g. a dialogue between a teacher and a student, or between a seller and a customer, etc.).

Dialogic discourse has its own distinctive features:

ѕ Reactivity: the development of a dialogue depends on how each participant reacts to their interlocutor's words;

ѕ Situational character: communication is driven by a certain discourse situation which determines the motives for and the aim of discourse.

II. In terms of formality, discourse can be considered as formal (planned) or informal (unplanned). Both of these discourse types may be presented in oral and written form, however, less formal discourse is more often associated with spoken discourse.

It is of importance to specify that the boundary between formal and informal discourse is fuzzy, and many intermediate cases are found between the polar opposites in this classification, e.g. a seminar.

III. From the point of reciprocity, discourse can be reciprocal (two-way) and non-reciprocal (one-way). Reciprocity of discourse implies that interaction is likely to occur, which can happen in the following cases, as underlined by Guy Cook (1989):

ѕ “the sender can monitor reception and adjust to it;

ѕ the receiver can influence the development of what is being said” (p. 60).

A low level of reciprocity is observed in extended talks (or monologues). A high degree of reciprocity is typical of conversations (or dialogues) where interaction takes place in a more explicit way. In conversation, interlocutors exchange ideas in turns through the processes of production and reception, thereby coming into evident contact with one another. The most apparent instance of reciprocal discourse is a face-to-face conversation. The opposite pole of reciprocal discourse is non-reciprocal discourse, characterised by the unlikelihood of communication taking place between a sender and receiver. This may be illustrated by the example of a book by a dead author. However, absolute non-reciprocity is improbable. Thus, as Cameron (2001) stated, “… extended talk, if done well, also needs to take account of the listeners and how they will understand the longer talk turns” (p. 52). The linguist has supported her idea with the fact that when planning their stories (monologues), teachers adjust their talks to the students' age, backgrounds, psychological states, etc., to ensure their understanding of the stories.

The discourse which is of primary interest to us in this study is a narrative, also known as storytelling (Brown & Yule, 1983), which has been referred to as a type of monologue or extended talk. In part 1.4 of the Theoretical Framework, the technique of storytelling will be more closely scrutinised regarding to the development of discourse competence.

1.2 The Concept of Discourse Competence and its Role as a Component of Communicative Competence

Discourse competence has been the focus of attention of many applied linguists, anthropologists, and researchers and is said to deal with the study of how words, sentences and utterances are selected, sequenced and arranged within “their full textual, social, and psychological context” (Cook, 1989, p. ix) for the purpose of producing a meaningful coherent text in written or oral form.

Discourse competence is often discussed in the context of communicative competence the development of which is imposed on students of all levels of foreign language education in schools, according to the Federal State Educational Standards FSES (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2009, No. 373). The connection between discourse competence and communicative competence may be traced through the examination of the most widespread classifications of the latter in the foreign and Russian methodologies.

The model of communicative competence by Canale and Swain (1980) is considered to have gained the highest acceptance among all the models proposed by applied linguists and scholars overseas. From their perspective, discourse competence forms part of communicative competence, along with three other components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. Grammatical competence deals with the use of grammatical rules of language and was well defined by Jacquelyn Schachter (1990) as the knowledge of “the rules of formulations or constraints that allow us to pair sound with meaning, … that form syntactic constructions or phonological or semantic patterns of varied sorts” (p. 40). Strategic competence is described as the ability to make effective use of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies (cognitive, metacognitive, memory-related, self-monitoring, stalling or time gaining, interacting and social) in order to “overcome difficulties when breakdowns occur” (Celce-Murcia, D?rnyei, & Thurrell, 1995, p. 7). Meanwhile, sociolinguistic competence accounts for how sociocultural factors, such as age, social status, differences in dialects, and so on, affect the language which participants use to interact with each other. However, some linguists have found this categorisation of communicative competence inaccurate. Thus, Schachter (1990) viewed discourse competence as “knowledge of the structure of text (in the larger sense of the meaning of text, subsuming both written and oral text)” (p. 42) and argued that it should be considered as a whole in combination with sociolinguistic competence. In her argumentation, she appealed to the fact that it is obvious of “unity of a text [to] involve appropriateness and depend on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction” (p. 43).

When agreeing with the Canale and Swain's model of communicative competence, Douglas Brown (1987) made a significant remark the essence of which lies in the idea that grammatical and discourse competences are based on the use of the linguistic system. To show a clear difference between these two competences, the linguist shared the facts that grammatical competence concentrates on the study of language at the level of the sentence, whereas discourse competence deals relationships between sentences. Michael Stubbs (1983) also demonstrated the intersection of discourse and grammatical competences, “Discourse competence attempts to study the organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause and larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written text” (p. 1).

At this point in the research, it is important to discern the following inferences. All the components of communicative competence tend to be interrelated. Therefore, they should not be viewed as totally separate categories since only the development of all of them together makes it possible for a learner to become a competent user of language.

We should not neglect the works of Russian linguists and scholars in distilling the essence of communicative and discourse competences. One of the first and still the most used classifications belongs to Inessa Bim (2007) who viewed an ability to communicate in a foreign language as the practical aim of foreign language learning and included the following components (competences) into the notion of communicative competence (Bim, 2007):

· Linguistic (or language) competence - the acquisition of language tools;

· Discourse competence - the acquisition of discourse skills: speaking, listening, writing and reading;

· Sociocultural competence - sociocultural and regional-geographic knowledge and skills;

· Compensatory (strategic) competence - an ability to make up for the lack of language knowledge;

· Academic-cognitive competence - an ability to learn.

In our study, we stick to Canale and Swain's and Bim's interpretations of discourse competence in which it serves as one of the constituents of communicative competence, as stated earlier.

However, there exist other frameworks which place discourse competence differently, contrary to the aforementioned models. In his classification, Chen Si-Qing (1990) presented two categories of general language proficiency: competence and performance. The difference between the two concepts was introduced by Chomsky (1965) who said, “We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)” (p. 4). In other words, performance implies the realisation of competence.

What makes this model distinctive is the role of communicative and grammatical competences. It is seen that grammatical competence does not form part of communicative competence, as in Canale and Swain's model, but exists as an individual component of competence in the meaning of the language system. Meanwhile, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competences are not embodied in communicative competence but are put in the line with it.

A different perspective on discourse competence might be gained through Lyle Bachman's (1990) Communicative Language Ability (CLA) Framework which suggests the existence of three categories: language competence, strategic competence and psychomotor skills. Psychomotor skills have been divided into productive (oral and visual) and receptive (audio and visual) skills. Strategic competence was defined by the linguist as “the mental capacity for implementing the components of language competence in contextualised communicative language use” (Bachman, 1990, p. 67). The components which language competence comprises are organisational and pragmatic competences. Pragmatic competence is defined as the ability to choose language appropriate to the situation, and it includes illocutionary (ideational, manipulative, heuristic and imaginative functions) and sociolinguistic (register and dialect, naturalness, references, and figures of speech) competences. Organisational competence, which accounts for how language is organised at different levels, subsumes grammatical (morphology, lexis, phonology/graphology and syntax) and textual competences. The latter is of particular interest to our study since it corresponds to the discourse competence of Canale and Swain's model. Bachman (1990) identified textual competence as “the knowledge of the conventions for joining utterances together to form a text, which is essentially a unit of language - spoken and written - consisting of two or more utterances or sentences that are structured according to rules of cohesion and rhetorical organisation” (p. 88). Thus, after studying the proposed Bachman's framework, it became apparent that the scholar gives some idea of the possible definition of discourse competence by introducing textual competence. However, some inaccuracies may be noticed in this categorisation of communicative language proficiency. For example, the blurred distinction between a type of knowledge and the process of learning or acquiring that knowledge raises doubt as to whether this model can be fully relied on.

The extensive studies of discourse and the existence of a variety of models of communicative competence have led linguists to have two different perspectives on discourse competence.

According to one group of remarkable scholars (Canale and Swain, 1980; Savignon, 1983; Brown, 1987; & Qing, 1990), discourse competence is the ability to produce meaningful and coherent stretches of communication from sentences and utterances. Thus, the experts have included the meaning of the proper organisation of discourse in the definition of discourse competence.

The other group of linguists best represented by Gumperz (1977) and Schachter (1990), in their interpretation of discourse competence, emphasised the vital role of sociocultural assumptions, values and behaviours for producing and perceiving the meaning of discourse. Schachter's (1990) point of view lied in the overlap between discourse competence and sociolinguistic competences. The scholar stuck to the idea that these competences could be seen as either one component or one competence as part of the other (i.e. discourse competence as a subcategory of sociolinguistic competence). In his study, Gumperz (1977) also wrote about a close correlation of discourse competence with sociocultural knowledge, in which sociocultural knowledge plays a crucial role of a communication maintainer when supplementing grammatical competence during communication. So, it has been concluded that a child acquires language and becomes competent in discourse when he or she “undergoes the normal process of socialization” (Narang, 1996, p. 247). Therefore, language should not be taught solely within the rules of grammar but should be integrated into the sociocultural context and supplemented with the knowledge of social norms. To support this, Vaishna Narang (1996) made an excellent point, “In fact a child learning his language and learning to interact with his environment never receives linguistic data isolated from socio-cultural context” (p. 247).

Interestingly, Guy Cook (1989) stated, "Discourse analysis examines how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social, and psychological context, become meaningful and unified for their users" (p. ix), thereby combining both of the perspectives on discourse competence: cohesive and coherent organisation of discourse, on the one hand, and sociolinguistic use of language, on the other. Thus, this illustrates again that discourse competence cooperates with and is influenced by other constituents of communicative competence.

Components of Discourse Competence

After reviewing various classifications of communicative competence and identifying the role of discourse competence in it, it was seen as high time to study the aspects discourse competence involves.

Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) considered discourse competence as a complex notion which comprises the following areas: “cohesion, deixis, coherence, generic structure, and the conversational structure” (p. 13).

The first component of discourse competence to be discussed and the lowest level within the domain of discourse - cohesion - deals with cohesive devices, the so-called bottom-up elements, which perform various functions. For example, anaphora and cataphora are in charge of signalling textual co-reference. Meanwhile, other cohesive devices such as substitution and ellipsis are used by speakers and writers to avoid repetition and indicate co-classification. Cohesion also accounts for how conjunctions, for example, `and', `but', `however', etc., create explicit links between statements in written and oral discourse. Another aspect of cohesion (also a part of coherence) - lexical chains and lexical repetitions - relates to content schemata, semantics and derivational morphology. Finally, last but not least, an element associated with cohesion as well as coherence - parallel structure - performs an important function of facilitating the readers' or listeners' understanding of a piece of information in a text. Thus, it is easier to perceive the meaning from the parallel construction `I like singing and dancing' than from the unparallel counterpart `I like singing and to dance'.

The second component of discourse competence suggested by Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) is deixis. The deixis system stresses the role of the situational context in the interpretation of discourse, or more specifically, of deictic words and phrases, such as personal pronouns (`I', `you') and spatial (e.g. `here', `there'; `this', `that'), temporal (e.g. `now', `then'; `before', `after') and textual references (e.g. `the following chart', `the example above', etc.). To communicate any meaning, deictic words and phrases need context.

The third aspect of discourse competence is coherence, which was defined by Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) as “the degree to which sentences or utterances in a discourse sequence are felt to be interrelated rather than unrelated” (p.15). Coherence is concerned with the organisation of propositions in accordance with a top-down approach. Thus, a receiver of a message applies their content schemata (i.e. prior knowledge of a subject, familiarity with a topic, cultural experience), takes into consideration social relationships/roles and shared knowledge to interpret the content and the purpose of discourse and to track the development of the theme and rheme, as well as to manage old and new information. Guy Cook (1989) pointed out two main categories of social relationships senders and receivers can have: 1) “friend to friend”; 2) “stranger to stranger” (p. 89). The linguist further divided the second group into:

ѕ “private person/official;

ѕ patient/doctor, nurse, dentist” (Cook, 1989, p. 89).

Moreover, to make discourse coherent, the speaker/writer arranges propositional structures using preferred organisational sequences, i.e. “spatial organisation, temporal/chronological ordering, condition-result, cause-effect” (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995, p. 15).

The fourth component of discourse competence - generic structure - deals with knowledge of discourse forms - formal schemata, or in other words, with the use of the genre pertinent to a certain discourse. To specify, a sender and receiver apply formal schemata and use their knowledge of a variety of genres (e.g. service encounter, narrative, interview, research report, etc.) and their specific structures and features to convey and interpret respectively a proper message. Some genres are more highly structured than others; this can be exemplified by such spoken genres as the sermon and oral narrative. The former has a more highly deniable structure than the latter which is more open-ended. Although the structure of oral narrative can vary, a set of features such as “opening/setting, complication, resolution” (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995, p.16) are retained nevertheless.

The final aspect of discourse competence - conversational structure - “is inherent to the turn-taking system in oral conversation… but may extend to other oral genres” (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995, p.16). This component accounts for how interlocutors:

ѕ perform openings and reopenings

ѕ “establish and change topics

ѕ hold and relinquish the floor

ѕ backchannel (i.e. give short verbal or non-verbal “carry-on” feedback)

ѕ interrupt

ѕ collaborate (i.e. complete utterances with or for the interlocutor)

ѕ do preclosings and closings” (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995, p. 16).

ѕ have adjacency pairs - a kind of turn-taking - that involves a two-part exchange in which the second speaker responds to the greeting, invitation, request, etc. of the first speaker who then holds the floor again.

At this point, we need to illuminate the fact that adjacency pairs are a form of dialogic discourse and thus, are not the focus of our study since we aim to demonstrate the development of discourse competence by means of storytelling which deals with monologic discourse.

Approaches to Developing Discourse Skills

There are two approaches to discourse skills development distinguished by scholars: top-down and bottom-up (Cook, 1989). A top-down approach which implies the joint work of all levels of language is also named holistic, while an atomistic (bottom-up) approach is concerned with the separation of language into parts.

According to the top-down approach, a learner first looks at the most general features of discourse and gradually moves to the most detailed. Applying background knowledge or schemata, a student recognises the topic of the text to predict the contents and may take notes on a given topic. The text is being scanned in order to identify the type of discourse, its structure and function. A learner tries to imagine the sender and intended receiver of the message and then considers specific words which demonstrate the use of conversational mechanisms, i.e. how the topic is developed and changed throughout the discourse, how well the speaker/writer manages to collaborate with the interlocutor and to perform openings and closings. This leads the reader/listener to the analysis of discourse in terms of cohesion and grammatical structures.

Contrary to the top-down approach, the bottom-up processing occurs when a learner begins with examining the most detailed features of discourse and moves to the understanding of the text as a whole. The first step implies the study of discourse from the point of grammar and lexis patterns where a listener/reader seeks to understand words and identify their grammatical functions. The discovery of cohesive devices which have facilitated the organisation of the text is crucial at this stage. With that behind, a receiver recognises the type of discourse and its purpose, then goes on to “establish overall structures of discourse related to particular discourse types” (Cook, 1989, p. 79) and analyses conversational mechanisms. Afterwards, a listener/reader tries to understand the relations between the people involved in the discourse and how their shared knowledge has affected and shaped the message of the text.

As pinpointed by a British applied linguist Guy Cook (1989), a “top-down approach to language regards all levels of language as a whole, working together, while a bottom-up approach divides communication into discrete levels, which can be dealt with separately” (p. 82). The scholar believed that although separate levels may be useful at times, a competent language learner should be able to cope with all parts together at once, “usually at high speed” (Cook, 1989, p. 83), to get involved in successful communication.

Traditionally many linguists have favoured atomistic activities to holistic ones (Guy Cook, 1989). However, Guy Cook (1989) was sure to say that a more natural way to encourage discourse is to use a holistic top-down process. To argue in favour of this proposition, the linguist claims that a bottom-up approach focuses on the formal language system only, where sentences and utterances are presented in isolation, out of context. Meanwhile, Marianne Celce-Murcia, a professor of applied linguistics and teaching ESL at the University of California, Los Angeles, stated that discourse competence is the intersection of bottom-up and top-down processes, “This is where the bottom-up lexico-grammatical microlevel intersects with the top-down signals of the macrolevel of communicative intent and sociocultural context to express attitudes and messages, and to create texts” (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995, p. 13).

1.3 The Specifics of Primary Students' Discourse Competence

So far we have defined the concept of discourse competence in general and identified its components with the help of the theoretical works of foreign linguists. With this knowledge in mind, we shall now take a close look at discourse competence in regard to young learners, since our research is aimed at primary school students. To this end, it is essential to delve into the exemplary basic educational programme of primary general education (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2015, No. 1/15) designed in accordance with the FSES for primary school (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2009, No. 373) and explore the specifics of primary school foreign language education and the place and image of discourse competence in it. This indispensable step will help us to further assess the target students' current level of discourse competence.

It should be highlighted that primary school is a special period in children's lives which forms a solid base for further educational stages. The singularity of the primary school lies in the facts that:

ѕ Children proceed to a new activity - studying - which takes on the leading role previously occupied by the playing activity;

ѕ Children gain new social positions in class and at school as a whole, and thus grow their needs for communication, cognition, social recognition and self-expression.

ѕ Children take on the roles of students which determine a new lifestyle and offer a wide range of possibilities for personal and cognitive development.

ѕ Children learn to plan, organise, conduct, evaluate and control their school activity; they learn to set up educational goals and stick to them until they are achieved; they learn to cooperate with the teacher and classmates in the realisation of their school activity.

Since the role of successful primary school education is so high, educational programmes of primary general education should correspond to and maintain high standards. To this end, it is vitally important to understand the nature of students of primary school age.

An eminent child psychologist Jean Piaget studied children's development from birth to 12 years old and proposed 4 stages of children's development which, as he argued, are inherent to all children (Pinter, 2011). According to his theory of cognitive development formulated in 1936, young learners aged 7 to 11 are at stage three called “concrete operational stage”. During this period (Pinter, 2011):

– children are able to think in an operational manner and “in a logical fashion” (Pinter, 2011, p. 9), but cannot apply formal logic in decontextualised situations and always need reference to real life;

– children are competent in using analogy;

– children's symbolic thought emerges to the fullest (e.g. “an ability to make one thing stand for another, i.e. a map for a town”) (Pinter, 2011, p. 9);

– children understand the processes of reversibility and conservation (e.g. realising that an action can be changed);

– children establish cause-and-effect relations;

– children are able to classify objects in a hierarchical way (e.g. putting `dog' and `pet' together, not `dog' and `chair');

– children are able to cope with multiple aspects of a task (i.e. the process of de-centration);

– children are gradually becoming less egocentric;

– children possess “relational logic (mentally order a set of stimuli along a dimension)” (Pinter, 2011, p. 10).

When devising the exemplary basic educational programme of primary general education (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2015, No. 1/15), the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia used as a basis the Piaget's approach to the study of children's development and characterised primary school age as the time of (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2015):

— The development of core psychological processes: verbal-logical thinking; arbitrary semantic memory; voluntary attention; analysis of and reflection on the content, grounds, and methods of actions; an ability to plan and act internally; symbolic thinking applied to modelling essential relations between objects;

— The development of goal-oriented and motivated students' activity aimed at mastering the educational process which is based on the formation of a sustainable system of educational, cognitive and social motives.

The task-based character of the foreign language learning process today corresponds to the nature of students aged 6.5 to 11 who perceive things holistically, emotionally and actively.

The review of the exemplary basic educational programme of primary general education (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2015, No. 1/15) and the FSES for primary school education (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2009, No. 373) has given a clear image of the objectives set by the modern foreign language primary school educational system in Russia:

— The introduction of children to a new social experience by means of using a foreign language: their familiarisation with the cultures of foreign peers and with foreign children's folk and fiction literature.

— The development of a respectful attitude towards the homeland and its traditions and a tolerant and friendly attitude towards the representatives of other countries.

— The development of primary students' intellectual and cognitive abilities.

— The development of children's motivation for further long-term foreign language learning.

— Multifaceted primary students' personal development by means of learning a foreign language.

Meanwhile, the pivotal aim of foreign language education in primary schools which combines all the aforementioned developmental processes is the acquisition of elementary communicative competence - an ability to communicate in a foreign language at the elementary level, should the need arise, in the oral (speaking and listening) and written (reading and writing) forms. In this connection, a foreign language functions not as a goal itself, but as a mediator - it integrates skills and knowledge and serves as a means of establishing and maintaining communication.

As part of elementary communicative competence, primary students are expected to develop elementary discourse competence in four discourse skills: speaking and listening (spoken discourse competence), reading and writing (written discourse competence). Elementary spoken discourse competence involves (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki Rossijskoj Federacii, 2015):

1. Speaking:

ѕ An ability to perform a dialogue of two-three remarks long from each interlocutor based on the written or recorded children's folklore writings and in a limited number of typical communicative everyday situations:

Ш Etiquette dialogue - implies an ability to exchange greetings, to get acquainted with your interlocutor, to introduce yourself, to bid the partner farewell, to congratulate them on something and thank them for the congratulations, to apologise;

Ш Inquiry (question-answer) dialogue - implies an ability to ask questions beginning with: Who? What? When? Where?

Ш Dialogue-inducement - implies an ability to make a request and express readiness or refusal to comply with the request with the help of the Imperative mood.

ѕ An ability to perform a monologue of five-six phrases long:

Ш Narrative - implies an ability to speak about yourself, your family and friend;

Ш Description - implies an ability to describe an object, a picture, to describe characters from the read fairy tales using a picture.

2. Listening:

ѕ An ability to aurally comprehend the teacher's and classmates' speeches in the process of communication in class, to understand the gist of short audio texts (fairy tales, stories) of up to one minute long based on the studied material with the help of provided pictures and contextual guessing technique.

Elementary written discourse competence which is intended to be acquired at primary school includes:

3. Reading:

ѕ An ability to read aloud short texts of approximately one hundred words long (excluding articles) based on the studied material and to comply with the rules of word stress and intonation.

ѕ An ability to read silently and understand texts (their gist) of approximately one hundred words long (excluding articles) containing the studied material as well as some new words; to read for specific information (the name of the main character, the place of action).

ѕ An ability to use a bilingual dictionary.

4. Writing:

ѕ The technique of writing: copying a text, filling it in with words or word-combinations, writing out words or word-combinations from the text.

ѕ An ability to write a congratulations letter and a short personal letter based on a sample letter.

It has been stressed that the training of all four discourse skills takes place in an interrelated manner. However, it has also been noticed that spoken discourse competence sets off and develops at a faster pace than the written due to the objective reason: it takes more time for students to learn to write and read than to speak. Notwithstanding the aforementioned difference, a primary school student is expected to become equally competent both in spoken and written discourse by the end of primary education.

Cameron (2001) stated, “Young learners between five and ten years lack awareness of how to cater for other participants in discourse…” (p. 52). Therefore, the development of such discourse forms as arguments, instructions, and opinions is postponed to the next stages of school education since they imply more advanced communicative skills; whereas, as mentioned above, primary students enhance their spoken discourse competence in narration and description.

A narrative is considered to be “a mode of mental organisation” (Cameron, 2001, p. 54), and its primacy in the development of elementary discourse competence in the foreign language is referred to its wide application in the first language (L1) in various situations of children's lives. Thus, young learners encounter a narrative in storybooks read by their parents before they go to bed, as well as in cartoons and songs. Narratives form a considerable part of children's daily conversations with parents in L1, often beginning with the phrase `Let's tell mommy what we did today'. A narrative represents a certain story and it is characterised by such basic features as temporal and topical sequencing of events, the deliberate actions of participants, the relations of causality, and usually unexpected problem-solving. In part 1.4 of this Theoretical Framework, we will conduct more intensive research into the benefits of using stories with primary students since our aim is to demonstrate the contribution of storytelling to the development of young learners' spoken discourse competence.

Descriptions deal with the categorisation and naming of objects, humans or animals, and, like narratives, are widely used from a child's early age in child-parent interaction and can be found in children's information books and television programmes. The production of descriptions requires young learners to build logical argumentation and substantial part-whole relations.

Opal Dunn (2013) concluded that spoken discourse competence should be developed prior to the written. This is attributed to the fact that children are natural language acquirers, and speaking and listening are somewhat inherent to them. Indeed, from the very first days of their lives, children actively listen to their mother tongue and, being a few years old, they start to pronounce their own words, thus `tuning into' language from an early age. Opal Dunn (2013) added that later when a child begins to learn another language, “he approaches it in the same way as when he learns L1, which he is still picking up” (p. 14).