The Use of Picture Stories in the Investigation of Crosslinguistic Influence

The Use of Picture Stories in the Investigation of Crosslinguistic Influence LAURA SANCHEZ University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain SCOTT JARVIS Ohio University Athens, Ohio, United States Ⅲ One remarkable fact about the use of visual prompts in L2 research is that the characteristics that can make a picture story inappropriate for certain purposes can make that same picture story quite useful for other purposes This is what we have found regarding our use of picture stories (and also films) in investigations of crosslinguistic and cross-cultural influences on L2 acquisition and use From the perspective of the 33 criteria proposed by Rossiter, Derwing, and Jones (this issue) for selecting and creating effective picture stories for L2 research, we have found that picture stories that, at first glance, may be interpreted as violating RESEARCH ISSUES 329 Criterion (“Does each panel have a single event?”) and Criterion 28 (“Are actions clear?”), in particular, are sometimes quite useful for investigating crosslinguistic effects These images are useful because the objects and events depicted in visual stimuli are often mentally categorized, conceptualized, and recalled in different ways by learners from different native-language backgrounds A picture story that we have found useful for these purposes is informally known as “The Dog Story.” This picture story was adapted from Heaton (1966) and has been used in the battery of tests in the Barcelona Age Factor project.1 The picture series comprises six panels, and the plot of “The Dog Story” is as follows: There are two main protagonists, a boy and a girl, who are getting ready for a picnic; a secondary character, their mother; and a character that disappears and later reappears, a dog that gets into the food basket and eats the children’s sandwiches (Muñoz, 2006, p 21) The panels that we focused on in Sanchez and Jarvis (2006) were the first two, where (a) a mother is shown pouring a beverage into a thermos (for her children, who are shown in the foreground preparing a picnic basket), and (b) a dog is shown getting ready to climb or jump into the picnic basket while the children’s backs are turned We think that both of these pictures may violate Criterion 28 (“Are actions clear?”) because we found that we, ourselves, differ in how we interpret what the pictures show Yet, it is precisely this fact that made the results of our study so interesting We found that whereas native English speakers tend to describe the two events as involving specific types of directional motion (e.g., “pouring milk into a thermos,” “jumping into the basket”), native Spanish speakers and Catalan-Spanish learners of English tend to describe the two events as actions whose manners are nondescript but which bring about a change of location (e.g., “putting tea in a bottle,” “putting himself in a basket”) Related findings have come from studies that have used a picture story known informally as “The Frog Story,” which is a wordless picture book titled Frog, Where are You? (Mayer, 1969) A series of studies published in Berman and Slobin (1994) used this picture story with children from several different language backgrounds, and the results of the studies suggest that speakers of different languages differ with respect to how tightly they verbally represent various events For example, when describing a particular series of three consecutive panels in “The Frog Story,” speakers of English and German tend to refer to only one or two actions, 330 This project is coordinated by Carmen Muñoz, and has been possible thanks to three grants by the Ministry of Education and Science and the Catalan Ministry of Education (BFF2001-3384, PB97-0901 and HUM 2004-05167) TESOL QUARTERLY but speakers of Spanish and Hebrew tend to segment the same episode into three separate actions (see pp 11–12) Subsequent work by Kellerman (2001) and Vermeulen and Kellerman (1999) has suggested that these and related L1-based tendencies often transfer into a learner’s use of an L2 Accordingly, what determines whether a panel depicts a single event (cf Rossiter et al.’s Criterion 4) may depend on the learner’s native language and cultural background, but it is precisely this condition that makes these types of picture stories so interesting for research on crosslinguistic influence Picture perception involves a special ability to interpret (a) “features of pictures that are not found in non-pictorial objects” and (b) the implications of details that have been left out of those pictures (Kennedy, 1976, p 220) Because pictures are not exact representations of real-world objects and events, viewers not merely perceive but also conceptualize (i.e., mentally construe) what a picture represents, and the fewer the details a picture provides, the more those details must be supplied by the person’s own conceptualization (cf Domander, 1978, p 296) Researchers who are interested in crosslinguistic influence at the level of conceptualization often intentionally select or create pictures in which certain details are missing to investigate whether or how learners from different language backgrounds fill in missing information The studies mentioned earlier using “The Dog Story” and “The Frog Story” have certainly used this approach Perhaps an even clearer example can be found in the work of von Stutterheim and colleagues (e.g., von Stutterheim, 2003; von Stutterheim & Nüse, 2003), who used film clips that omit the end points of events to leave something to learners’ imagination Their decision to use film clips instead of picture stories was probably driven largely by their need to make the nature of the depicted action (e.g., walking versus standing or running) very clear to the learners so that they could control the types of variables that might affect their reference to end points The decision to use a film versus a picture story thus depends heavily on the specific focus of one’s study, and one could also say the same thing about the choice between a picture story and a single picture Von Stutterheim (2003) implies that picture stories may be better for the investigation of learners’ construal of event-time structures, whereas single descriptive pictures may be better suited to the investigation of their conceptualization of spatial relationships We wish to emphasize the importance of having the same picture series (or the same film) used in multiple studies conducted by multiple different researchers Even though it would not make sense for all studies of L2 acquisition that use picture stories to use the same set of pictures, it also would not make sense for every study to use a different set That would lead to a condition where no two studies would be comparable and where, consequently, no study’s findings could be either confidently RESEARCH ISSUES 331 confirmed or rejected by later studies Fortunately, many of the picture stories that have been used by researchers in our field for data elicitation purposes have been used in multiple studies by many different researchers “The Dog Story” is a good case in point Narratives elicited using “The Dog Story” form an important part of the Barcelona English Language Corpus,2 and data elicited with this picture story have been used in investigations of morphosyntactic accuracy orders, the development of oral fluency and interactional skills, the use of discursive elements in narrative development (see the different contributions in Muñoz, 2006), and various types of crosslinguistic influence involving more than one target language (e.g., Sanchez 2006; Sanchez & Jarvis, 2006) Not only does the use of the same picture series in multiple studies facilitate the cross-comparison of results, but it also has the added benefit of establishing the validity and reliability of the picture series (or film) as a research tool THE AUTHORS Laura Sanchez is a lecturer at the University of Barcelona, Spain, where she teaches courses on descriptive grammar and applied linguistics She is also a member of the Barcelona Age Factor project and conducts research on crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of L4 English by EFL Spanish/Catalan learners with L3 German Scott Jarvis is an associate professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States, where he teaches courses related to L2 acquisition and language assessment His primary research emphases include crosslinguistic influence and the measurement of lexical diversity REFERENCES Berman, R., & Slobin, D (Eds.) (1994) Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Domander, R J (1978) Comments on W A Adams’ analysis of J M Kennedy’s seven features of pictures Leonardo, 11, 295–297 Heaton, J B (1966/1972) Composition through pictures London: Longman Kellerman, E (2001) New uses for old language: Cross-linguistic and cross-gestural influence in the narratives of non-native speakers In J Cenoz, B Hufeisen, & U Jessner (Eds.), Cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition: Psychological perspectives (pp 170–191) Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters Kennedy, J M (1976) Comments on Deregowski’s analysis of seeing a picture for the first time Leonardo, 9, 219–221 Mayer, M (1969) Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Press 332 The narratives in the Barcelona English Language Corpus have been coded according to the conventions of the CHAT subprogramme in CHILDES (Child Language System), and are available online (TalkBank, 2008) TESOL QUARTERLY Muñoz, C (Ed.) (2006) Age and the rate of foreign language learning Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters Sanchez, L (2006, October) Where language and cognition touch: Cross-linguistic influences in spatial conceptualization Paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum, Seattle, Washington, United States Sanchez, L., & Jarvis, S (2006, June) Framing transfer in narrative discourse: “Footprints” of L1-based perspectives Paper presented at the joint meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics, Montreal, Quebec, Canada TalkBank (2008) Barcelona English Language Corpus [raw data.] Available from http://talkbank.org/data/SLA/ Vermeulen, R., & Kellerman, E (1999) Causation in narrative: The role of language background and proficiency in two episodes of “The Frog Story.” In D Albrechtsen, B Henrikeseen, & E Poulsen (Eds.), Perspectives on foreign and second language pedagogy (pp 161–176) Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press von Stutterheim, C (2003) Linguistic structure and information organization: The case of very advanced learners EUROSLA Yearbook, 3, 183–206 von Stutterheim, C., & Nüse, R (2003) Processes of conceptualization in language production: Language-specific perspectives and event construal Linguistics, 41, 851–881 RESEARCH ISSUES 333