Understanding protagonist, causal, and intentional links during EFL narrative reading

Information in narrative texts is linked by different, multiple dimensions such as protagonist, causality, intentionality, spatiality, and temporality. However, little is known about how English as a foreign language (EFL) students understand different dimensions of narratives during reading. This study explored Japanese EFL students' understanding of multidimensional links between narrative sentences, focusing on three important dimensions for comprehension: protagonist, causality, and intentionality. In the experiment, 35 Japanese graduates and undergraduates read narrative texts. Some of the texts contained context sentences that are consistent or inconsistent with later target sentences in terms of the three dimensions. Reading times for target sentences revealed that the participants detected inconsistencies in the causality and intentionality dimensions, indicating that they understood causal and intentional links during reading. The participants understood intentional links most stably, suggesting that intentionality has the prominent status in EFL narrative comprehension. By contrast, the participants failed to understand protagonist links. These findings lead us to propose that EFL readers understand three important dimensions of narratives to different degrees, which provides some implications for EFL reading instruction.