Narrative performance across contexts and over time: Preschool Chinese children and mothers (Taiwan)

This study aims to explore growth in preschool Mandarin Chinese-speaking children's narrative development and the scaffolding strategies Mandarin mothers use to promote their children's narrative competence over a nine month period. The relationship between children's narrative competence and maternal scaffolding strategies was also examined.; Sixteen children, eight boys and eight girls, and their mothers living in Taipei, Taiwan participated in this project. The children were visited in the home at four time points when they were 42 (Time 1), 45 (Time 2), 48 (Time 3), and 51 (Time 4) months of age. Three dimensions of the child's independent narrative skills, i.e., narrative structure, evaluation, and temporality, in telling personally experienced stories were assessed from an individual growth modeling perspective at each time point.; The interactive strategies, types of information requested and provided, and use of evaluative and temporal devices in Mandarin-speaking mothers in two dyadic contexts: joint personal anecdotes and book reading, across the four time points were also investigated, with focus on level and change in maternal scaffolding strategies across contexts and time. The relationships between maternal scaffolding techniques and their children's concurrent and later narrative competence were further examined using correlation analysis.; Summary of the results gained from this study are the following: (1) Mandarin-speaking children, generally speaking, include more narrative components, evaluative information, temporal/causal markers in their personal experience narratives over time. The growth patterns and rates of change for each child for each narrative measure vary. (2) Diversity in the narrative scaffolding techniques of the Mandarin mothers in the joint personal anecdotes and book reading is evident. The strategies employed by the mothers are highly variable across the four time points and inconsistent between the two dyadic contexts. (3) The mothers who request or provide durative/descriptive and evaluative information in the dyadic contexts have the children who include more durative/descriptive and evaluative information in their talk. Moreover, maternal approval or attention to the child's talk, elaborative request, and provision of information facilitate the child's narrative competence, but maternal memory prompts, directives, and repetitive questions do not play a significant role in promoting the child's narrative ability.