The Development Of Narrative Ability Of Three-Six-Year-Old Preschoolers Speaking Mandarin-Chinese

Narrative ability is an essential part of children’s language learning.The research on children’s narrative ability has received much attention from scholars at home and abroad.Researchers have studied children’s narrative ability from multiple perspectives and found that children’s narrative ability can reflect information about children’s linguistic,cognitive,emotional,and social development.The preschool period is a critical stage for children’s narrative ability development.Therefore,research on the development of narrative ability is essential for the language education of preschoolers.A total of 40 Mandarin-speaking children aged three to six in Chinese mainland were selected for this study.The corpus was collected by recording the picture reading narratives.This paper coded and analyzed multiple indicators in the corpus with the help of CHAT and CLAN analysis software,and performed descriptive statistics,One-way ANOVA,and post hoc tests on the quantitative data obtained.Using a combination of macro and micro analysis,we attempted to characterize the development of children’s narrative abilities in four dimensions:basic language profile,narrative structure,narrative evaluation,and narrative temporality.For the basic language profile,children aged three to six developed significantly in total micro-indicator use.At the semantic level,NTW,NDW,and TNU had the same developmental pattern.That is,the critical periods were four to five and five to six years old,and children of the same age group after four years old achieved increasingly asynchronous development.In contrast,MLU and MLU5 showed different critical periods of growth at the syntactic level but were relatively consistent across children of all ages.In particular,MLU increased significantly only at the age of four to five,whereas MLU5 increased significantly in both the age groups of four to five and five to six,suggesting that MLU5 was a better indicator of the main effect of age than MLU.Regarding narrative structure,the total use of narrative structure increased significantly from the age of three,with four-year-olds able to tell a fully structured story.Event accounted for the largest proportion of all narrative structure types,and it stopped increasing significantly after four-year-old.In contrast,closing accounted for the smallest proportion,and it did not develop at all between the ages of three and six.However,children may narrate more complex events and use longer closing with age,as children gradually shift their focuses from the part to the whole.Direct speech showed the most remarkable developmental features.Children’s use of direct speech increased significantly yearly,with critical periods at ages three to four,four to five,and five to six years,but children were not good at applying reported speech.There were two possible reasons.One was that reported speech required consideration of the psychological aspects of the characters in the story.The other was that the reported speech was a secondary source language processing involving changes in reference,which was more difficult for children.For narrative evaluation,the age of four to five years was a critical period for the overall development of children’s narrative evaluation,including the development of the total number of uses and the diversity of devices applied.Among the ten categories,emotions,evaluative adjectives,evaluative adverbs,and intensifiers/delimiters showed similar developmental features.Namely,they tended to stagnate from three to four years old and increased significantly only at ages four to five.This consistency may be due to the strong correlation among these four categories.Children were more adept at applying evaluative words to modify nouns and verbs and to express emotion,intention,exaggeration,and explicit negation but less frequently for verbal qualifiers,comparison,and repetition for effect.In addition,some cultural differences were found in using core evaluative devices.Different thinking patterns and language characteristics may be the main reasons for these differences.Regarding narrative temporality,the development of total narrative temporality use preceded the development of diversity in children aged three to six years.Children preferred the sequential connectives and aspectual expressions to the temporal connectives.The mastery of causal connectives was the poorest among the four types,and preschool was not a critical period for its development.Besides,the development of sequential connectives and aspectual expressions preceded that of the temporal connectives,which may be attributed to the cognitive order and the nature of object existence.The secondary coding results further showed that children preferred producing de5shi2hou4(when)to express information about the temporal context of events among all temporal connectives.Ran2hou4(then)proved to be overused in all age groups,which was also common in preschoolers of other languages.Based on the above findings,this study provided several feasible suggestions for organizing narrative activities in the hope that it can better help educators improve the narrative abilities of preschoolers.