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No. 38 (2021)
Continuous publication

Language pedagogy

Structural Complexity in Narrative Texts

Published 2021-08-17

  • Ligia Ochoa Sierra

Ligia Ochoa Sierra
Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Abstract

Storytelling is a textual sequence that appears transversally in the different school grades and cycles; however, no studies providing a set of criteria to determine its complexity, in order to adequately stagger the texts where this sequence prevails. In this quantitative research with a descriptive-interpretive design, the variables that establish the structural complexity inherent in 65 narrative school texts were investigated. To this end, the texts were analyzed based on 20 variables belonging to the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels. These texts were classified by linguistic experts into four levels of complexity. A statistical analysis was applied to answer the
central question: which linguistic variables and criteria determine the structural complexity of the corpus under analysis? The results show that the quantity and variety
factors with predominantly semantic and pragmatic variables enable to predict the complexity of the analyzed texts. These results enrich the theoretical discussion on the criteria that allow measuring the complexity of a text and can be an input for future research both in the field of applied linguistics and in education.

Keywords

text, storytelling , linguistics

PDF (Español)

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