An Empirical Study On The Correlation Of 4/5 Year-old Children’s Listening-Reading Habits And Their Oral Narrative Competence

The language development of an individual may be regarded as an epitome of human language evolution and thus researches on children’s language development could shed some light on understanding how language shifts from primary structures to more complex ones. Taking the perspective of ontogenesis, this empirical study thus aims to explore the impact of 4/5 year-old children’s early listening-reading habits upon their oral narrative competence.Semogenesis in systemic functional linguistics is a semantic-oriented theory which concerns the meaning-making mechanism that is realized in the time frame, i.e. phylogenesis, ontogenesis, and logogenesis. It regards the early childhood as a critical period for individual’s preference of making choices from language as a system of meaning potential. Thus the early childhood language learning is considered as the projection of the historical development of the languages and the carrier of individual linguistic development. Narratives by children thus provide authentic data that is deemed suitable for the investigation of children language developmentEarlier studies(e.g. Huang 2005; Zhou 2007) have shown that early reading habit of an individual has an impact on their linguistic competence. In a similar vein, using the data of narratives produced by 160 4/5 year-old children, this study aims to explore more thoroughly and systatically the correlation between listening and reading habit and oral narrative competence. These children are grouped by their early listening-reading habits along with the considerations of gender and personality(hereafter “group 1” for children with better listening-reading habits and “group 2” for the children with less listening-reading experience). They are required to retell an imagined story after the data collector read it twice. And they will get appropriate scaffolding once they cannot go on. The data was compared with respect to genre and lexico-grammar, and then explained it in terms of the Zone of Proximal Development(here after ZPD) which is proposed in social-cultural theory, with an aim to provide effective suggestions for oral narrative improvement.The research questions to be addressed are as follows:(1) Whether children’s oral narrative competence is correlated with their early listening-reading habits?(2) What are the differences and their lexico-grammatical realizations between children with different early listening-reading habits?(3) What are the ontogenetic elements of children’s oral narrative development? How to improve children’s oral narrative ability?Based on the interpretations on different stratifications of language, this study draws the following conclusions.First, the language of 4/5 year-old children is in pre-adult stage where egocentric speech can still be observed. Children’s oral narrative competence is correlated with their early listening-reading habits in a positive way. There are significant discrepancies of the frequencies and the types of the narrative deviations.Compared with the mature adult language, the deviations occur on the clause level at first. During the process of story-retelling, children tend to drop some of the original code and let the helper know by using clauses that are not related with the story at all. At the same time, children enrich the story by adding some clauses to the original one. The enrichment is usually realized by more detailed description rather than structural development. By contrast, the adults’ narrative will be more focused on the logic and structure of the story. Meanwhile, children’s oral narratives are often with externalized thinking processes which are realized by phrasal deviations, such as repetition, silence, mistakes, redundancies, and clausal deviations, such as “I don’t know”. Further, ideational grammatical metaphors and interpersonal grammatical metaphors are observed to emerge in children’s oral narratives. In ideational grammatical metaphors, transitivity metaphors occur more often than nonminalization whereas mood metaphors take the main part in interpersonal ones. These can all be counted as the characteristics that distinguish children from the other social groups at different cognitive stages.Social activities are all intend to interact and communicate with others, which is essentially dialogic. When children come across difficulties in narratives, they tend to invite the helper into the dialogue. That is where the helper’s scaffoldings come in. However, it is observed that children in group 1 are less in need of the scaffoldings from the helper. At the same time, other significant discrepancies are also observed in different children’s narratives, such as phrasal clauses, incomplete clauses, enlargement, epithet, amendment, ellipsis, hesitation, inconsistency, and yes/no question, etc.Secondly, different early listening-reading habits do have a significant impact on 4/5 year-old children’s narratives. The influences are found in several aspects, including genre, schematic structure, transitivity process, modality system, mood system and cohesive devices.As to the genre characteristics, there is difference in schematic structure. Children in group 1 tend to create the main part of the story on their own. They are much more capable of figuring out the stratified narrative structure as well as the meaning resources for detail description. They also creat an embedded structure which allows themselves to stay in, and also come out of, the story, thus leads to a core-narrative genre. On the other hand, children in group 2 tend to recount a series of events in a lineary way and create a dialogic-recount genre. Since narrative can be considered the advanced level of recount, it is plausible to argue that the children in group 1 may have learned a better stretagy in oral narrative.In the procedure of decoding-reconstruction, all the transitivity processes were found in children’s narratives, but the number of valid clauses produced by children who are less experienced in listening and reading is less than the more experienced ones’. More specifically, in the transitivity system, more than 60% clauses are identified as material process, which inturn proves the importance of material process in construing human experience. However, children with different listening-reading habits show significant differences in using relational clauses, verbal clauses and existential clauses. On the element level, children in group 1 are more likely to employ circumstancial elements than the children in group 2.In interpersonal meaning realization, children in group 2 make more mistakes in deictic transference. In the mood system, children in group 1 use a remarkable number of exclamative clauses in order to express subjective emotions and are in good command of modal expressions, such as adverbs of degree and modality operaters, whereas the children in group 2 are tend to use polarity operater and relational process.In terms of discourse structure, children at this age prefer a rhythmic and predicatable circle in narratives, but the circle does not mean a complete narration. Children in group 1 are familiar with the complete structure, including the introduction, the orientation, the circle, and the coda, while children in group 2 are mainly able to deal with the circle part.Thirdly, children will be more conscious about genre information by reading and retelling materials with a particular genre.Through early listening-reading experience and the co-construction of narration, children become more conscious of their meaning potential and its realizations in the independent construction of texts. They produce semantic spaces in their narrations, among which children in group 1 are shown to be able to create a larger and more complicate one.Last but not least, to choose is to mean. Children learn how to make choices based on their accumulated meaning potential and know how to make amendments during the production of discourse, by themselves or by others, in which they can build up the narrative preference and then drive the linguistic individuation into another stage.In doing this experiment, it also becomes clearer that language and education are close to each other, i.e., we are actually learning through language. Children’s language ability decides whether they can construe their experiential world through the meaning system. A good listening-reading habit may help a child to accumulate more meaning potential and therefore to create semantic spaces through the unreal roles and events. These narratives will promote their understanding of conceptions such as time and space, real and unreal, as well as the dialogic space between texts and individuals. What we suggest here is that training the children to retell the stories they heard will help them to acquire more efficiently language as a system of meaning potential and to monitor the logical-semantic organization of their own words. In doing this, the children’s words, therefore, can also be observed and directed by co-constructing the texts with the caregiver and thus can expand the zone of proximal development.