Study On Development Of Preschoolchildren’s Narrative Abilities In A Mandarin-speaking Context

The ability for children to narrate is indispensable to the overall communicativecompetence and literacy skills needed at schools later. Narratives have been widelyapplied in everyday life, from story retelling to personal experience recalling and havecarried culturally and linguistically important information. It involves thecoordination of a web of knowledge, cognitive abilities and linguistic abilities.Narrative abilities that preschool children display can not only present their linguistic,cognitive and social development, but also foretell how they will perform when theywill be learning reading and writing at school later. Hence, the development ofnarrative abilities is of significance to preschool children and the related research isapplicable and practical.Most of the research on Mandarin Chinese acquisition in existing literatureremains on a syntactic level and below. Furthermore, a great number of research intoChinese children’s language development have been carried out in the perspective ofpsychology, which leaves potential room for linguists to catch up since each field hasits special focus and perspective. This dissertation, therefore, aims to do study andanalysis on a text level to analyze the dynamic developmental pattern of preschoolchildren’s narrative abilities.In line with this aim, the study looks particularly at development patterns andcharacteristics of micro-and macro-structural dimensions in preschool children’snarratives from48m to72m. Eight dimensions are singled out to be studied in detail,i.e. orientation, complicating action, evaluation, dialogue, reference, ellipsis, MLU(MLU5), and conjunctions. The study is both quantitative and qualitative to ensure thevalidity and reliability of the outcome. A summary of the results gained from thislongitudinal study is as follows.The results indicate that the usages of the eight dimensions are not developingsynchronically, though the preschool children’s narrative abilities generally grow overthe period from48m to72m. Among the dimensions studied, complicating action andevaluation are the structural dimensions which preschool children have to spend six months on developing significantly, but dialogue is a measure on which they need12months to progress significantly. The children’s skill in including orientation does notshow any progress over the study period.Meanwhile, the micro-structural analysis indicates that the preschool childrenoverall develop their narrative abilities from48m to72m. Inspection of data ofreference shows a slow progress every12months from48m to66m and is increasingrapidly from66m to72m. Likewise, ellipsis is also a dimension that takes12monthsto be fully developed. MLU does not show any progress since54m on, while MLU5begin to display a steady increasing trend every six months from then on till thechildren are66months old. The six months from66m to72m sees no progress insyntactic length. The rather steady SD values of MLU and MLU5through the twoyears indicate there is a synchronic development for the children’s syntactic ability.Conjunctions prove to be hard to acquire since there is not any progress from48m to60m. The small SD values show that the tardy development is a commonphenomenon for all our subjects. However, the children develop rapidly in that from66m to72m.The individual child studied also displays a similar developing pattern with someslight deviations concerning both macro-and micro-structural dimensions.The layout of the dissertation is as follows:Introduction is a brief lead-in to the research background and purpose of thisstudy.Chapter one reviews the literature and related studies on the first languageacquisition, narratives and development of children’s narrative abilities. Researchmethods, procedures and application results have also been reviewed to offer aframework for methodology in this study.Chapter two develops a methodology for investigating the developmental patternof preschool children’s narrative abilities in a Mandarin-speaking context based onwhat have been reviewed in the last chapter.Chapter three and four exhibit the findings and results of the group case study from macro-and micro-perspectives respectively by using a T-test to compare thedata.Chapter five follows the same pattern with chapter three and four to process theindividual case data, i.e. data presentation, analysis and description of developmentalcharacteristics.Chapter six concludes the whole study and the main findings. Based on theinvestigation and analytical results, I tentatively offer suggestion for intervening andpromoting of preschool children’s narrative abilities as an essential part of languagedevelopment. Finally I have to point out the limitations of the current study, whichpaves the way for future study.