The Development Of The Narrative Ability Of Chinese Preschoolers

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the development of the narrative ability of Chinese preschool children. Narrative ability is also called story telling ability, which can reflect language competence. There are two types of oral narratives:the personal narrative and the fictional narrative. In this thesis, the narrative ability refers to the fictional narrative. The main form of the fictional narrative is the picture-elicited narrative which was investigated in the present study. Children’s picture-elicited narrative ability was examined through four microcosmic indices: Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Type-Token Ratio (TTR), Number of Different Words (NDW) and Number of Total Words per Minute (NTW/M). The increase of MLU can reflect the improvement of the children’s expressive ability. The increase of TTR can reflect the improvement of application in collocation. The increase of NDW can reflect the expansion of children’s vocabulary and their ability to narrate more complex events. The increase of NTW/M may suggest that children can speak more quickly and their ability in language organization has been improved. The data used in the study were drawn from2773-6-year-old children’s and1025-year-old adults’production in the picture-elicited story retelling task and story-telling task.The results show that the mean of these indices except for the TTR increased with the growth of age. The mean of the TTR remained relatively stable across all age groups including adult group. As for the NTW/M, we found three developmental stages:3;4-4;9,4;10-5;9and5;10-6;9. Gender effect was also found. Children demonstrated adult-like performance concerning the TTR. The6-year-old children have achieved the adult-like performance in terms of the MLU. And children’s richness of the vocabulary and the language organization ability were non-adult-like.