Narrative Structure and Evaluative Language of Personal Narratives Shared by Urban Aboriginal Children in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Labovian narrative theory is used to explore the personal narrative performance of five-year-old urban aboriginal children. Fifty-two participants with the same socioeconomic status (half aboriginal, half non-aboriginal) were recruited from 11 preschools in metropolitan Taipei, Taiwan. Narratives were collected by interviewing individual children about past experiences. Interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese, tape-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. With ethnicity as the independent variable, the results indicated the following: (1) in structure elements, urban aboriginal children tended to use more evaluations and non-aboriginal children offered more complicating actions. (2) Urban aboriginal children outperformed their counterparts regarding structural level (approximately half in the leapfrogging level and one-third in the chronological level). (3) Regarding evaluative features, urban aboriginal children used significantly more intention terms, sensory terms, reported speech, and negations, and non-aboriginal children used more obligation terms. The discussion and implication are provided in relation to cultural differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Personal narrative
• narrative structure
• evaluative function
• urban aboriginal children
• low socioeconomic family

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the children and their families for participating in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Wen-Feng Lai is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, National Taiwan Normal University. She teaches both master and doctoral level courses predominantly in cultural psychology and multicultural education. Her areas of research include cross-cultural studies in early narrative and drawing performance.

Notes

1 In the section on data analysis, an explanation is provided regarding why the Mann–Whitney U test was used in this study.

2 Bold words indicate evaluative terms.

3 Words in parentheses were added by the author.

Additional information

Funding

 The writing of the study was supported by The Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan under grant [grant number MOST 106-2410-H-003-070].