The Effects of Family Background, Academic Achievement, and Gender on the Oral Narratives of Taiwanese Second Graders

• Main Authors: Yu-Fang Huang, 黃鈺芳
• Other Authors: Shin-Mei Kao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/63785430016849221582

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 97 === Recent research in Taiwan has tackled issues in the language development of children with Southeast Asian mothers (hence, CSAM) (e.g., Cheng, 2004; Hsang, 2004; Wu, 2005; Chang, 2005). Findings are controversial. Some considered these children with disadvantage language learning environment, resulting in poorer academic achievements (Wu, 2005; Chang, 2005), while others claimed that this groups of children performed similarly to average Taiwanese children (Cheng, 2004; Hsang, 2004). Since “narrative” is the basic and first developed linguistic ability of children, and also provide an opportunity to observe children’s oral performance, this study aims to compares the oral performance of CSAM and CTM, through narratives of wordless picture series stories (hence, PSS), personal experience stories (hence, PES), and spatial single picture (hence, SSP) descriptions. Two other factors: children’s academic achievement and gender difference were also examined for their impacts on oral performance (Coates, 1986; Gi, 2003). The subjects were 27 CTM and 27 CSAM, with the mean age of 7:6. Quantitative aspects were calculated (e.g., mean length of pause unit (hence, MLPU), mean length of semantic unit (hence, MLSU)), and then the narrative structures (Labov, 1972), evaluation elements (Labov, 1972; Chin, 1999; Huang, 2002; Sah, 2006), narrative pattern (Peterson & McCabe, 1983), cohesive devices (Halliday & Hassan, 1976) were examined and analyzed. The major findings are as follows: In terms of general results: 1.All participants perform similarly in PSS; therefore, PES seems to be a more informative index for differentiating the children’s narrative performance. 2.All participants produced longer stories with more complete structure, evaluation elements, varieties of conjunctions, and comparative phrases in PSS. 3.All participants produced more pronouns in PES. 4.In terms of evaluation elements, all participants used a greater amount of direct quoted speeches and adjectives, as well as more adverbs to make the story lively. 5.The results of SSP, a task with picture prompts like PSS, did not reach any significance among the groups and thus resulted in no differences. In terms of family background: 6.The CTM group produced more complete stories, more syllables, and used more conjunctions than the CSAM group did in PES. 7.The CTM group produced more classic patterns in PSS and more time patterns in PES. On the contrary, the CSAM group often produced a chronological pattern in PSS and more impoverished personal stories. 8.The CIM group produced the shortest narratives, the least complete story structures, the fewest conjunctions in PES, and the least ordered patterns in SSP among all the three groups. In terms of academic achievement: 9.The high achievers spoke more fluently, used more adjectives in PSS, and produced more classic pattern PSS, than did the low achievers. 10.The low achievers inclined to produce more adjectives in PES, make more pronoun mistakes, and generate more chronological stories. In terms of gender: 11.In SSP, the female participants used more picture- oriented pattern of referencing base, while the male ones used more object-oriented patterns. To conclude, the results of this study help us understand the narrative performance of children at the age of 7 to 8 with different family/language backgrounds as well as different levels of academic performance and genders. Pedagogical implications are also provided.