Evaluation in Mandarin Chinese children’s personal narratives

Abstract

Evaluation is a critical component of personal narrative, the component that conveys to listeners how narrators feel about experiences that happened to them. Evaluation conveys the impact of what actually did happen in the context of what narrators expected would happen but did not or what they wished had happened instead. This chapter presents a study of how Taiwanese children develop the ability to evaluate their narratives and a comparison of Taiwanese to English-speaking children in their use of evaluative devices. Prior research (Minami, 1994; Minami & McCabe, 1995) suggests that English-speaking mothers provide more evaluation comments in telling past experiences with their children compared to Japanese-speaking mothers. Differences in use of evaluative devices were hypothesized to be evident across Chinese- and English-speaking children in their personally experienced stories.Mandarin Chinese-speaking children from Taiwan (N = 171) and 96 English-speaking children from the United States participated in this study. Chinese-speaking children were agesd 3 to 9 years and comprised seven groups (at each of those ages). English-speaking, American children were aged 4 to 9 years and comprised six groups. Following Peterson and McCabe’s conversational map (1983), the experimenter elicited a number of personal narratives from each child. Specific prompted topics such as visit to a doctor were given in conversation. The purpose of this task was to assess children’s narrative skill without adult’s support; neutral follow-up responses such as “uh-huh,” “tell me more” were used. Evaluation was coded in Chinese using an adaptation of the system Peterson & McCabe (1983) developed to code evaluation in English-speaking American children aged four through nine years. The percentage of each type of evaluative device per narrative comment was determined and Taiwanese children were compared in this way to American children from the Peterson & McCabe corpus. Results show that Taiwanese children included many fewer evaluation comments (13–25% of the children’s clauses were partially or fully evaluative) in telling their personally experienced stories compared to American children (50% at each age). Results are interpreted as reflecting deep and pervasive cultural differences: Chinese children are socialized to have an interdependent self (with less emphasis on what an individual felt in the past), while American children are socialized to have an independent self (with early and frequent emphasis on what an individual felt in the past).

The Narrative Dimensions Model and an exploration of various narrative genres

“…By scrutinizing such narratives and the shifts within them via the Narrative Dimensions Model, researchers may really bring to the fore the intricate, usually non-arbitrary, multi-dimensional nature of narratives (for examples, see Van De Mieroop, forthcoming). In addition, the model will enable researchers to identify potential cultural differences in narration (see e.g., Chang & McCabe, 2013). As such, this model can account in a more detailed way for the intra-and inter-genre variation that is typical of real-life narratives across various cultures, because it highlights dimensional differences as well as similarities between various narratives that may otherwise go unnoticed.…”

“…Fourthly, the comparative study of narratives of personal experience in various cultural contexts has also revealed many variations vis-à-vis Labov and Waletzky's (1966) description of stories. For example, it was found that Asian children's narratives differed from American children's in various ways, e.g., Japanese children focus more on "collections of experiences" in their stories (Minami & McCabe, 1995), which is also the case for Taiwanese children, who were also found to evaluate their narration less (Chang & McCabe, 2013). Of course, these variations cause problems when attempting to fit these narratives into the "narrow" definition by Labov and Waletzky, nor do these narratives always constitute a genre that is entirely different from the narrative of personal experience.…”

Children’s Use of Evaluative Devices in Response to the Global TALES Protocol

“…Throughout childhood, sharing personal narratives is important for building and maintaining friendships, for socio-emotional wellbeing, and for participating in classroom discussions or peer conversations. Children's use of evaluative devices when conveying personal narratives has been the subject of numerous research studies since Labov's [3] landmark study in the 1960s (e.g., [4][5][6][7][8][9]). However, sample sizes in these studies were relatively small, ranging from 16 to 41 per age or other subgroup, and a wide range of elicitation tasks and prompts have been used.…”

The development of narrative ability in English-Chinese bilingual primary school students in Singapore

“…The range of linguistic devices to express these relations includes conjunctions, adverbs, and tense. Chang and McCabe (2013) looked at the connectives used by different age groups of Taiwanese children learning English as a foreign language and found that older children expressed more causal relations in their stories than did younger children.…”