Narrative Structures In The Stories Told By Chinese Children

Storytelling is a complex process for young children, because in the process of telling stories, they not only need to consider the style of the story, the choice and use of language, the characteristics of listeners, but they also have to understand the basic structure of the story, reasonably arrange the development of the story’s plots, and carefully arrange the logical relationships between the elements of people, places, etc. in the story. Due to the influence of a variety of factors, every storyteller may deal with the above mentioned aspects differently. Because of this, all stories shall reveal have their own particular structures and a good story must have a clear and tight structure and the logical relationship between different elements must be consistent. For children, the narrative structures in the stories told by them have unique characteristics and to study these structural characteristics can help us learn children’s skills, abilities and deficiencies of telling stories so as to provide important reference value for the cultivation of children’s narrative ability.With the application of Labov’s narrative analysis model, this thesis tries to analyze and explore the narrative structures in the stories told by Chinese children aged9-11and compare the structures in the stories told by the children with the structural elements in Labov’s model and the structures in adults’ stories and further discuss the characteristics of the structures in the stories and the children’s ability of telling stories as well as their deficiencies revealed in the storiesThe results in this study reveal that the narrative structures in the stories told by9-11years old Chinese children only contain three of the six the elements in Labov’s model, i.e. orientation, complicating action and result or resolution. And according to the requirements for the elements of a fully-formed narrative structure in Labov’s model, the Chinese children, ranging from9to11years old, can not tell stories with complete structures. In the meantime, we notice that, for the Chinese children aged9-11, their ability of summarizing is weak and for them, an independent and mature value system needed to be established so that they can express their ideas or opinions to make an evaluation. In accordance with the findings, the thesis suggests that we should encourage children to express themselves as often as possible and design a variety of activities of making narratives, summarizing main ideas of different passages, telling stories, etc. And also we should lead children to establish positive and mature value systems and encourage them to express their thoughts, ideas and attitudes.