Chinese Language Development Of Malavsian 4-6-Year-old Children From The Ethnic Chinese Families

Malaysia is a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Country.In recent years,with the rise of China’s international status and the popularization of Chinese,more and more Malaysian families have begun to learn Chinese.However,there are only few studies on the development of Chinese language of Malaysian-Chinese children.Besides,the Chinese education in Malaysia is at the stage of lack of empirical support.This study targets the Malaysian-Chinese children aged 4 to 6 years,focusing on their Chinese language development and the phenomenon of language conversion.The research sample was evacuated from eight kindergartens,a total number of 192 Chinese children aged 4 to 6 years,in Malaysia.Based on one-to-one interactions between the researchers and children,the children’s Chinese corpora was collected encoded,and then analyzed,in terms of their Chinese vocabularies,grammar and code-switching phenomena;at the same time,relationships between Children’s language development and the Chinese language inputs of family environment were also explored.Some major finding is as the following:Regarding the development of Chinese vocabulary of Malaysian-Chinese children found that the overall vocD value of Chinese vocabulary of Chinese children,as well as the morphological number and frequency of Chinese nouns,verbs,adjectives,adverbs,pronouns and prepositions all gradually increase with age,and the total number of vocabularies will also gradually increase,showing an upward trend.However,compared with Chinese-Chinese children under Chinese cultural context,Malaysian-Chinese children’s quality of vocabulary development is relatively weak than that of Chinese-Chinese children.In terms of nouns,Malaysian-Chinese children mainly use the nouns of things,but not refers to nouns of people and abstract nouns;in terms of verbs,Malaysian-Chinese children produce mainly in action verbs,and less verbs or mental verbs;in terms of adjective,Malaysian-Chinese children mostly use for describing colors,rather than describing the object quality or emotional terms;in terms of adverbs,Malaysian-Chinese children appear to have problem using negative adverbs and frequency adverbs;in terms of pronouns,Malaysian-Chinese children produce a quite amount of personal pronouns;however,they lack use of plural form of personal pronouns and interrogative pronouns;in terms of quantifiers,Malaysian-Chinese children prefer to use "ge"(个),"zhang"(张),and "zhi"(只)to represent all quantifier terms,but lack use of partial quantifier,collective quantifier,infinitive quantifier,action quantifier.When Malaysian-Chinese children speak,they use summation tone to reinforce the nature of the event.Besides,from the correlation between gender and family,the research found that gender difference does not play a role on Malaysian-Chinese children’s Chinese language development,and the types of vocabularies.Finally,the finding indicates that the family language input medium and environment does not contribute to Malaysian-Chinese children’s Chinese vocabulary development,resulting in no significant on the development of Chinese vocD of vocabulary,different types of vocabularies and word frequency.Regarding the development of Chinese grammar for Malaysian-Chinese children,the research found that the overall development of Chinese grammar for Malaysian-Chinese children MLU and the overall level of grammatical structure MLU5 gradually increase with age,but both of them have a gap between the Malaysian-Chinese children and that of Chinese children in the context of Chinese culture.The gap is also common among the Chinese quantifier structure,word structure,prepositional phrase,object complexity and compound relational sentences.In addition,the correlation between gender and family analysis found that there is no gender difference in the overall grammar development level of Chinese-Malaysian children in MLU,but boys are better than girls in the overall grammar structure development level MLU5.The study also found that the correlation between the family’s language input environment,family language input medium and the overall development level of Chinese grammar MLU,and the overall development level of Chinese grammar structure MLU5 is not significant.Regarding the phenomenon of code switching of Malaysian-Chinese children,the research found that Malaysian-Chinese children frequently employ code switching during language expression.In addition,Malaysian-Chinese children have the characteristics of over-spoken language and the use of local pictographic language to assist communication.This research outlines the development and characteristics of the phenomenon of Chinese vocabulary,grammar and code switching among Malaysian-Chinese children.Based on the above analysis,we believe that the Chinese language development of Malaysian-Chinese children basically follows the Chinese language development laws,but compared with Chinese children in the Chinese cultural context,there are still some gaps in the language development of Malaysian-Chinese children in Malaysia.Family language inputs do not contribution to the children’s Chinese language development.This reminds us that to promote the Chinese language learning of Malaysian-Chinese children,it cannot rely solely on the family and family medium resources.The level of language learning and education of Malaysian Chinese children should be more resorted to Chinese preschool institutions.The research suggests that,first,Chinese language education in Malaysia needs to emphasize on the oral learning environment of young Malaysian-Chinese children.Secondly,to provide high-quality,standardized written language input in the early Chinese language education.Considerations should be given to provide opportunities for reading early childhood picture book.Thirdly,to enhance teachers’ own language level and language education level.Fourth,to promote the positive Chinese language interactive atmosphere in the family environment.