An Interpersonal Perspective Of Chinese Mother’s Role In Joint Mother-child Reading Practice

Parent-child interaction has long been the research interest of linguistic scholars.Among various interaction activities,shared book reading（SBR）is a popular research focus because it provides an enriched linguistic input for children’s language development than natural child-directed speech（CDS）.Most existing studies have concentrated on the quality and quantity of adult talk in order to know the optimal condition to enhance children’s language growth in SBR.However,when exploring adult talk from a micro perspective at the utterance level,they failed to reveal roles adults normally play and how these roles change in different situations from a holistic view.To address the research gap,this study aims to investigate what roles Chinese mothers adopt in mother-child interaction with books as a medium.This study selected a Chinese mother-child shared reading corpus on Child Language Data Exchange System（CHILDES）.In this corpus,mothers read three different books（a narrative storybook,a wordless narrative storybook and an information book）to their four-,five-and six-year-old child.There are 60 dyads selected for this study with 20 dyads in every age group.With the interpersonal metafunction in systematic functional linguistics as the theoretical framework,this study had three-fold coding systems: Mood system,Modality system and Appraisal system.There are three research questions for this dissertation: 1)Would mothers’ expression of Mood vary across child ages or book types? 2)Would mothers’ expression of Modality vary across child ages or book types? 3)Would mothers’ expression of Appraisal vary across child ages or book types?To answer these questions,Mothers’ extra-textual talk（maternal talk except direct reading）was coded and both qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted.This study has three major findings.Firstly,mothers in this corpus was a quite confident and dominating describer,informant and supervisor no matter which book mothers read and how old the children were.Secondly,when reading the narrative book,mothers tended to be a describer who was dedicated to telling the story with some extensions of the story;when reading the wordless narrative book,mothers took the initiative to become a story-builder who told the story built with her imagination;when reading the information book,mothers tended to become a teacherlike informant.Thirdly,when reading to younger children,mothers often encouraged children’s engagement,but when children were older,mothers were less likely to become the main describer;instead,they supervised children’s reading with occasional assistance without giving up her authority.In this study,the integrated analysis of qualitative and quantitative results revealed that Chinese mothers were always a dominating role in SBR and gave the highest priority to finish the goal of reading,and correspondingly,children were assigned a role as a compliant listener.