| The present study was an attempt to examine Chinese-English speaking children's comprehension and recall of written narratives in both Chinese and English. A total of sixteen children (6;5 to 7;10) participated in the study. Two Chinese and two English stories were used. The study utilized Kintsch's (1974) propositional analysis and Mandler and Johnson's (1977) story grammar in coding recall. A comparison was made between the two languages in terms of the total number of propositions, structural categories accurately recalled, and the number of correct responses to the questions. Parent's responses to a questionnaire were used to examine the effect of L1 and L2 knowledge, and some other factors on individual children's reading comprehension and recall.;The following are results of the study: (1) The subjects produced more text propositions from the English stories than from the Chinese stories, but there was no significant difference in the total number of propositions accurately recalled between the languages. (2) There was no significant difference in the proportion of story categories recalled from the English and Chinese narratives. The Beginning and Ending categories were better recalled than the Reaction and Attempt nodes in both languages. But, the Reaction and Attempt categories were better recalled from the English stories than from the Chinese stories. (3) No difference was found between the two languages in the total number of questions answered correctly. But, children were significantly more accurate in response to the main idea questions in English as compared to Chinese. (4) There was no significant correlation between children's level of comprehension of narratives in English and comprehension in Chinese. (5) The subjects' performance was found to be significantly better in the probed recall than the free recall for both English and Chinese.;Based on the findings, it was concluded that reading comprehension and recall of stories in English did not vary significantly from that of the Chinese stories, in terms of quantity of recall in these bilingual children just beginning to learn to read both languages. However, some qualitative differences were found in readers' performance in English and Chinese recall tasks. The story nodes that the children had difficulty in recalling are just those nodes that children frequently leave out because they require inferencing. This is an affect of development not of being bilingual. The study suggested that the difficulties that these bilingual children were having in learning to read English and Chinese are typical problems that native beginning readers encounter in learning to read either language due to the characteristics of each language's structure. Furthermore, factors including the individual's attitude and motivation to acquire language, the strength of the native language, home language environment, years of schooling in China and the U.S., parent involvement in the child's learning languages, and individual personality affected English and Chinese language acquisition and, also, reading in the two languages. Finally, language competence was the most important factor in comprehension and recall. Other variables, such as the nature of the task and the variation in structures within narrative texts, might also be factors most likely to influence comprehension and recall by these Chinese-English speaking children. |
