{"title":"Proficiency and compensatory strategies in bilingual children’s Mandarin Chinese narrative","authors":"He Sun, Justina Tan, Lin Feng","doi":"10.1007/s11145-024-10541-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Narrative skills play an important role in children’s reading, communication, and critical thinking. Most studies on narrative skills are based on monolingual children from middle- to upper middle-class populations and few have examined bilingual children’s narratives outside of the western context. These factors may impose different sociocultural influences on children’s storytelling abilities. The current study focuses on English–Mandarin bilingual children in Singapore and explores: (1) how English–Mandarin bilinguals apply their Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency to a given narrative task and (2) the compensatory strategies they employ in their Mandarin narratives. Data was obtained from 186 K1 pre-schoolers (85 boys and 101 girls) aged four to five. Children’s Mandarin narrative skills were assessed with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al. in ZAS Pap Linguist 56:155–155, 2012. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.56.2019.414). Their macrostructural knowledge (<i>e.g.</i>, story grammar) was scored with the MAIN coding scheme, and their microstructural knowledge (<i>e.g.</i>, mean length of utterance) was calculated with CLAN. Children’s Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency (<i>i.e.</i>, receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and semantic fluency) was assessed with standard tests. The results indicate that compared to children’s microstructural knowledge, their macrostructural knowledge was more influenced by their Mandarin competence. Children used a variety of strategies to compensate for their limited Mandarin competence, and the most frequently used ones were generalisation (<i>e.g.</i>, all classifiers of nouns were “个”), codeswitching (at both the word and sentential levels), and sentential structural transfer.</p>","PeriodicalId":48204,"journal":{"name":"Reading and Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Reading and Writing","FirstCategoryId":"95","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-024-10541-8","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Narrative skills play an important role in children’s reading, communication, and critical thinking. Most studies on narrative skills are based on monolingual children from middle- to upper middle-class populations and few have examined bilingual children’s narratives outside of the western context. These factors may impose different sociocultural influences on children’s storytelling abilities. The current study focuses on English–Mandarin bilingual children in Singapore and explores: (1) how English–Mandarin bilinguals apply their Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency to a given narrative task and (2) the compensatory strategies they employ in their Mandarin narratives. Data was obtained from 186 K1 pre-schoolers (85 boys and 101 girls) aged four to five. Children’s Mandarin narrative skills were assessed with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al. in ZAS Pap Linguist 56:155–155, 2012. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.56.2019.414). Their macrostructural knowledge (e.g., story grammar) was scored with the MAIN coding scheme, and their microstructural knowledge (e.g., mean length of utterance) was calculated with CLAN. Children’s Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency (i.e., receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and semantic fluency) was assessed with standard tests. The results indicate that compared to children’s microstructural knowledge, their macrostructural knowledge was more influenced by their Mandarin competence. Children used a variety of strategies to compensate for their limited Mandarin competence, and the most frequently used ones were generalisation (e.g., all classifiers of nouns were “个”), codeswitching (at both the word and sentential levels), and sentential structural transfer.
期刊介绍:
Reading and writing skills are fundamental to literacy. Consequently, the processes involved in reading and writing and the failure to acquire these skills, as well as the loss of once well-developed reading and writing abilities have been the targets of intense research activity involving professionals from a variety of disciplines, such as neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and education. The findings that have emanated from this research are most often written up in a lingua that is specific to the particular discipline involved, and are published in specialized journals. This generally leaves the expert in one area almost totally unaware of what may be taking place in any area other than their own. Reading and Writing cuts through this fog of jargon, breaking down the artificial boundaries between disciplines. The journal focuses on the interaction among various fields, such as linguistics, information processing, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, speech and hearing science and education. Reading and Writing publishes high-quality, scientific articles pertaining to the processes, acquisition, and loss of reading and writing skills. The journal fully represents the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of research in the field, focusing on the interaction among various disciplines, such as linguistics, information processing, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, speech and hearing science and education. Coverage in Reading and Writing includes models of reading, writing and spelling at all age levels; orthography and its relation to reading and writing; computer literacy; cross-cultural studies; and developmental and acquired disorders of reading and writing. It publishes research articles, critical reviews, theoretical papers, and case studies. Reading and Writing is one of the most highly cited journals in Education, Educational Research, and Educational Psychology.