L2 NARRATIVE COMPETENCE

In using the term narrative, we would like to refer to all types of discourse in which event structured material is shared with readers or listeners . In the research literature, narratives are commonly subdivided into fictional and personal. Fictional narratives are stories about fictional events. They can be elicited with verbal and non-verbal prompts, such as pictures or videos. Personal narratives are stories based on speakers' personal knowledge and experience.

L2 narrative competence, in our view, refers to a learner's ability to interpret and construct personal and fictional narratives in their foreign language . We then compared the narratives of each group of speakers. This comparison allowed us to single out three components of L2 narrative competence that can be fruitfully practiced in the classroom:

• mastery of narrative structure,
• mastery of linguistic means of evaluation and elaboration, and
• mastery of linguistic cohesion.

In the next section on Narrative Genre and Structure , we describe and illustrate these components using some examples. We also make some recommendations about general activities and exercises that teachers might want to design for their students to practice some of these componets. Throughout we will use excerpt from the fictional narratives from our corpus to illustrate our remarks.

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