Lokale en Globale Coherentie in Verhalen van Eerste- en tweede-Taalleerders

This article discusses the way in which first and second language learners of Dutch structure their narratives. Subjects in the study presented here were 12 Turkish and 24 Dutch children in Grade 6 of Dutch primary school (mean age 10;3 for the Turkish and 10;2 for the Dutch children). All of the children had been in Dutch schools since they were four. The children told a story on the basis of a wordless picture story. The subjects first saw the whole story and then had to tell the story to the researcher. They had the picture story in front of them as a reference.I wanted to find out if the children made local or global coherence relations to organize their stories. Local coherence refers to the relation between an utterance and the one immediately preceding it. Global coherence means that there is a relation with the global theme of the story, or that there is a connection between larger parts of the text. For this reason, I investigated two points in the story where one could expect global coherence relations, namely the middle and the end of the story. The following questions were asked with regard to these two points: 1. Do the children make global coherence relations here or do they only make local coherence relations? 2. How do they make these relations?Overall, there were no differences between the first and second language speakers in the number of global coherence relations they realized. As for the way in which the subjects realized their local and global coherence relations, some differences were found, however. In addition, it turned out that all children made more global coherence relations at the end of the story than in the middle.