Study On Dinner Table Talk Of Preschool Children Family In Shanghai

Since the 1960s, dinner table talk began to be widely studied by Western scholars. These studies confirmed dinner table talk is important to various aspects of children, such as socialization, pragmatics, vocabulary ability, literacy. However, there are few studies on dinner table talk of Eastern countries; in addition, because of the Chinese traditional culture, dinner table talk is ignored by most Chinese parents. Therefore, they miss the educational opportunities during dinner time.In this paper, the samples are preschool children families in Shanghai, based on corpus analysis and previous studies, we establish the code system of types of talk and way of speech. Regulatory talk, explanatory talk and narrative talk are used to investigate the content of dinner table talk, and the speech act system in INCA-A coding tools are used to investigate speech ways of dinner table talk. Combining quantitative and qualitative method, the paper analyzes the preference of languages, the participation of speech, the types of talk and the ways of speech in Chinese family with preschool children, and thus shows the status as well as the problems of dinner table talk in the context of Chinese culture.The result on this study are as follows:as for the preference of languages, the dialect usage rate of parents is higher than children’s, the influence of child gender\ parental education、initial birthplace to parents and children is not quite the same. And, there is a significant positive correlation relationship between dialect usage rate of parents’and children’s; as for the speech participation, parents is higher than the child, and speech participation of both parents and children in dinner table talk are higher than that of parent-child interaction context, but lower than the United States’dinner table talk; as for the types of talk, explanatory talk is most used, followed by regulatory talk, and the narrative talk is the least. Though the participation of parents and children is different among these three types, there was a significant positive correlation between the types usage rate of parents and children, on the use of specific categories, Chinese families not only show consistency across cultures but also exhibit unique oriental culture; as for ways of speech, the use of speech acts types between parents and children exhibits different characteristics, but speech acts types of parents can influence speech act types of children in a certain extent, consequently constituting the co- construct interact mode.In addition, the study finds different families form different styles of interaction, which can be divided into "eating-centered family"、"let-it-be family" and "positively-extending family", and the reasons of the formation of interaction styles are also explored. Overall, the quality of dinner table talk in Chinese families should be improved. Finally, the paper makes preliminary recommendations to parents in order to promote the quality of dinner table talk, hoping that the family can improve interaction during dinner so as to hold this rare educational opportunities in daily life.