A Comparative Study Of Narrative Abilities Of Chinese-&English-speaking Preschoolers

Narrative, also called story-telling, is a decontextualized languageskill. There are two types of narrative: writing narratives and oralnarratives in representation form. There are two different broadly definedtypes of oral narratives: personal narratives and fictional narratives.Picture-elicited narrative is an important fictional narrative type, whichplays a crucial role in the development of children’s language andcognitive competence. In this thesis, narrative abilities refer to thepicture-elicited narrative abilities of normal preschoolers. Children’snarratives are not only the performance of their language capacity, butalso the process of self presentation. People from different culture havedisparate narrative styles, and children’s narrative performance mayreflect the cultural differences.A cross-sectional comparative study is adopted for exploring thepicture-elicited narrative abilities of24Chinese-speaking children fromBeijing2Corpus aged from3to5years old and24English-speakingchildren from English Frog Slobin Corpus aged from3to5years oldthrough narrative structure, evaluation and temporality. The results areshown as follows.(1)In narrative structure, with the growth of age, both the narrativestructure of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking subjects is improvingday by day. Event narrations are easier than other narrative componentsfor children to master. Although there are no significant differences inmicro settings and most narrative structure components betweenChinese-speaking and English-speaking subjects, they pay attention todifferent event narrations. English-speaking children tend to make theirstories more detailed, and some of them may forget the task and turn totell their similar personal life stories. In contrast, Chinese-speakingsubjects favor important event narrations. They just want to express the gist of the story and will miss some details.(2)In evaluation, Chinese-speaking subjects use eight evaluationstrategies including evaluative adjectives, evaluative adverbs, emotions,emphasis, intensifiers or delimiters, intentions, negations and repetitionfor effect. Besides the foregoing eight strategies, English-speakingsubjects also use verb qualifiers, but Chinese-speaking children useevaluation strategies more frequently. As the development of age, thefrequencies of other strategies increase except for repetition for effect.English-speaking subjects tend to use emotions and emphasis to expresstheir evaluation toward the story, but Chinese-speaking subjects userepetition for effect and adverb more frequently.(3)In temporality, English-speaking subjects use connectives morefrequently than Chinese-speaking subjects do. The frequency of aspectualexpressions both in English-speaking and Chinese-speaking subjects’narratives is the highest and sequential connectives occupy the secondplace. However, causal connectives only emerge several times.English-speaking subjects feel like telling the story with simple past andpast progressive tense, while Chinese-speaking subjects tend to use someauxiliary words and adverbs such as “le, zhe, zheng4zai4” to expressaspectual expressions. Besides, the frequency of “le” is far higher thanthe other words.Culture differences, language specificity and cognitive complexityare the main causes of the differences between Chinese-speaking andEnglish-speaking preschoolers’ picture-elicited narrative performance.