Analysing Narrative Elements in Short Fiction: A Study of Students' Writing Skills

Narrative writing is a crucial element of English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction in tertiary education. It contributes to the development of students’ language proficiency, creativity, and critical thinking skills. By adopting a mixed-method research design, the present study examines the extent to which ESL diploma students incorporated the five elements of Freytag’s Pyramid including exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution into their 80-to-100-word narratives written by 66 ESL diploma students in Malaysia. The study also investigates the challenges students encountered when incorporating the five elements into narrative writings within the given word constraints. To elicit data, 66 narrative essays were collected and analysed. To further explore how the five elements were applied by students in their narrative writing and the challenges they encountered in writing short stories, the researchers interviewed five students. The results revealed that most students could write exposition and rising action effectively, but often omitted or weakly developed climaxes, falling actions, and resolutions. Several issues that they encountered when writing short stories including strict word limit, first language interference, limited vocabulary, and other factors. Pedagogical implications include the integration of vocabulary expansion strategies, model story analysis, and peer-review workshops to scaffold students’ narrative competence. The study contributes to ESL pedagogy by extending Freytag’s Pyramid to micro-narrative writing tasks under strict word constraints.

English as a Second Language, Freytag’s

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