A Study Of The Narrative Development Of Five-to-nine Years Old Chinese-speaking Children

Language is critical in children’s development.As a comprehensive indicator of children’s language development,narrative plays an essential role in helping to identify cognitive barriers,predict later literacy performance,and reflect social and cultural differences.Narrative appears at three years old and continues to develop in later childhood until adulthood.Current research in China’s mainland is mainly focused on a particular stage,especially the preschool period,which separates the process of children’s narrative development and ignores the characteristics of continuity.The study,therefore,attempts to explore the developmental characteristics of Chinese children’s narrative performance from preschool to primary school in both macrostructure and microstructure.To be specific,this research aims to answer the following three questions:1)What are the developmental characteristics of five-to nine-year-old Chinese-speaking children’s narrative in the macrostructure?2)What are the narrative developmental characteristics of five-to nine-year-old Chinese-speaking children in the microstructure?3)Are there gender differences in the narrative development of macrostructure and microstructure?If yes,what are they?In order to answer questions,a total of 91 children from the middle class of kindergarten to the third grade in primary school from Shandong Province were recruited to participate in the research.Data were collected by recording the children’s narrative samples using the wordless picture book Frog,where are you?and distributing the home literacy environment questionnaire for basic information from their parents.Narrative performance in macrostructure was coded based on Miles and Chapman’s scoring schema.Narrative performance in microstructure was processed by CHAT and CLAN and analyzed by several indicators.Then the quantitative data were analyzed with descriptive statistics,One-way ANOVA,independent samples t-test,and nonparametric tests.Simultaneously,the qualitative description was made by combining the home literacy environment questionnaire and narrative samples in the discussion part.There are three major findings in the present study.Firstly,children’s narrative performance in macrostructure develops significantly in their transition period from kindergarten to primary school.The narrative performance in the macrostructure of five-year-old children is relatively backward compared to seven-and nine-year-old children.To be specific,the differences are shown in narrative coherence,integrity and complexity.The development of the narrative competence of seven-and nine-year-old children in primary school is steady.Coordination and consistency are shown in various indicators in the macrostructure.Secondly,as for narrative performance in microstructure,different indicators have different features.The talkativeness has no difference among children in different age groups.The increase of MLU suggests that children’s syntactic skills are developing.The increase of NDW and VOCD indicates that lexical diversity is accompanied by the development of five-to nine-year-old children.Thirdly,gender differences exist in both macrostructure and microstructure in younger children and decrease as they grow up.Theoretically,the research demonstrates the characteristics of narrative development of Chinese-speaking children and provides support for comparisons to future research.Practically,it offers implications to teachers,parents and the educational system in order to better develop children’s narrative competence.At last,suggestions for future research are given.