The Development Trend Of Children’s Irony Comprehension Ability In Primary School

Irony is a form of rhetoric intending to express the original intention by the literalform which is contrary to the original intention. It is difficult for children to get completecomprehension on this linguistic phenomenon. Recently it has become a hotspot of thephilosophy of mind and as one of the speech actions during daily social communication,irony is of great importance to children’s social development. Therefore, the researcherintends to study the primary school children’s irony comprehension ability based ondifferent sentence collocations (single ironic sentence, double irony sentence) and ironictypes (ironic criticism, ironic compliment).In this thesis, it started with philosophy thoughts and history of irony, as well as theconcepts and the basic theories of irony and discussed the developmental trend of thechildren’s irony comprehension ability. With the situational story method, the researchercarried out the whole study from3parts:(1) To prepare suitable ironic stories for testingprimary school children’s irony comprehension ability.(2)To investigate the developmentaltrend of primary school children’s irony comprehension ability from grade1to grade6.(3)To explore the effect of different sentence collocations and ironic types on primaryschool children’s irony comprehension.In the first research, the researcher gathered10ironic criticism stories and7ironiccompliment stories and invited8Chinese teachers and12psychology graduates to estimatethe appropriateness of the stories for the primary school children.16seven-year-old and16eight-year-old primary school children participated in the previous research from the sameclass. The results of the first research showed:(1)8ironic stories selected as the formalmaterials used in the following two researches were very suitable for children’s daily lifewith high reliability and validity.(2) There was no significant difference between theseven-year-old group and the eight-year-old group of irony cognition.(3) There was nosignificant effect on children’s irony comprehension from the irony types for both of thetwo groups.In the second research,4stories from the previous research were selected as theresearch materials to examine the developmental trend of the children’s irony comprehension ability. The results showed:(1) The developmental trend of primary schoolchildren’s cognition abilities towards attitude and meaning displayed synchronization andboth developed far earlier than the phenomenon explaining ability.(2) Children couldcatch the irony meaning of speakers since grade1, but they couldn’t do the phenomenonexplaining until grade4and the ability was still developing during grade6.(3) Thedevelopmental trend of the children’s irony comprehension ability turned out gradedifference increasingly from the junior to the senior, grade4maybe a turning point duringthe development of the children’s irony comprehension ability.(4) There was nosignificance between schoolboys and schoolgirls.(5) Primary school children from grade2,3&6got different performance on ironic criticism and ironic compliment stories. Thegrade2and3did better on ironic criticism and the grade6did better on ironic compliment.The third research aimly discussed the effect of sentence collocations and irony typeson the developmental trend of the children’s irony comprehension ability. The results werefounded that:(1) Under the three-persons situational background, the developmental trendof primary school children’s cognition abilities towards attitude and meaning of thedisplayed synchronization and both developed far earlier than the phenomenon explainingability.(2) When the three persons were peers, sentence collocation had a great effect onchildren’s irony comprehension. Single ironic sentence would be more difficult thandouble irony sentence,(3) but the irony types had no effect on children’s ironycomprehension.(4) When two of the three persons were teachers, sentence collocation hada great effect on grade1,2,4&5children’s irony comprehension ability. Single ironicsentence would be more difficult than double irony sentence,(5)and the irony types had agreat effect on grade2-6children’s irony comprehension ability. Children from grade2andgrade3did better on ironic compliment; others did better on ironic criticism.