What did the child do with the bottle?

Overall, the native speakers’ responses are more precise with longer but fewer sentences, while the learners have more false starts and hesitations. Native Speaker 1 (NS1) adds extra lexical items to the sentence, e.g. “fekr mikonæm” and “ke mibini unja”. This is of course one characteristic of spoken language that is absent in written texts: in spontaneous speech, one speaks out one’s thought without always being concerned with formal grammar. Another difference between the native speakers’ utterances and those of the learners’ is that Native Speaker 2 (NS2) gives more background information, as in “ba’d væghti keh inha hævaseshun nist” (then, when they are not aware).
Interestingly, there was only one reference to location by the participants; NS1used “unja” (over there) as a deictic word which can be decoded in relation to where the speaker is. No one, neither the native speakers nor the learners, mentioned the word ‘shelf'.

While both native speakers used the compound noun “dokhtær bæcheh” for the child, Pari used a noun + adjective “dokhtær-e kuchulu” and Fereshteh used a single noun “nini”. Also, for the word “bottle”, the native speakers and Pari used an adjective to clarify what kind of a bottle it was: NS1: “one bottle of alcoholic drink”, NS2: “ one of these bottles of drinks”, and Pari: “one bottle of wine”. However, Fereshteh only said “bottle,” a possible “simplification strategy”.

For the action of “taking the bottle”, both native speakers used the verb “bar-dashtan” which means “to pick up/to grab/ to take out”. Pari used a less appropriate verb “gereftan”, which means “to receive/ to take/ to grab”; this verb should only be used when one takes/grabs/receives something from someone else. Fereshteh had a very hard time expressing the actions in this set of pictures. She whispered: “to grab, took nemidunæm (I don’t know), bedi (you give)”. This could be “appealing for assistance” or private speech (in sociocultural terms). When Fereshteh couldn’t find a word she liked for this action, she created a dramatization from the child’s mother’s perspective: “ don’t do it, don’t do it, please, this is grandma’s bag, stop please, … sit down.”

Pari and both native speakers indicated where the child put the bottle, using “tu/tu-ye” (into) that is necessary to complete the meaning of the action “putting”. All four speakers specified the possessor of the bag (Pari: “old woman’s bag”; Fereshteh: “grandma’s bag”; NS1: “old lady’s bag”; and NS2: “old lady’s bag”).

To sum up, it seems that Pari was more successful than Fereshteh in describing actions, but both learners convey their intended referential meanings one way or another, using different communicational strategies in spite of limited linguistic resources.

2. Compare the learners’ oral version and written version of this narrative.

Pari’s written Narrative is almost the same as her oral Narrative with slightly different changes in parts of speech. For instance, in the oral Narrative, Pari says “the old woman and the other woman” when she is mentioning them for the second time; but in her written Narrative, Pari, uses a third person plural pronoun “anha” (they). Pari spells the Persian “gh” correctly while she pronounces it as “k” in her oral Narrative.

In both her oral and written Narratives, Fereshteh uses the same approach of dramatizing a conversation from the grandma’s and the girl’s perspective but in the written version she tries to be more clear by putting the meaning or spelling of words that she does not know in parentheses using English or writing Persian with the English alphabet. It is worth mentioning that in her written Narrative, she succeeds in referring to the action where the child put the bottle in the old lady’s bag, by switching to English. She writes in Persian “and then this baby, is/has grandma’s bag and put [in English] this bottle in this bag. This baby is very naughty.”

Overall, both learners’ written versions of the bottle transfer are clearer and more accurate than their oral versions. This is suggestive of the nature of spoken and written languages.