Narrative Development of Mandarin-Speaking Children in Grades 2–5 at a Mainland Chinese Primary School

Abstract

This study investigates the narrative development and main characteristics of primary school students in grades 2–5 in mainland China. Data from 120 primary school students were collected using indicators of narrative development and self-designed narrative ability tests. According to the findings from the analyses, primary school students of different grades demonstrated different performances in terms of macrostructure (completeness, profundity) and microstructure (productivity, elaboration, normative). These results demonstrate that the narrative development of Mandarin-speaking children from grades 2 to 5 in mainland China can be divided into two stages: the grade 2 is the spoken words writing stage and grades 3 to 5 is the transition stage, which means the age effect is significant. Furthermore, the main characteristics of Mandarin-speaking children’s spoken words writing stage in mainland China are as follows: They can use language description and psychological activities to describe and record characters, but the structure of story is incomplete; they tended to end a story with an objective ending, while the narrative is insufficient and narrative accuracy is not high. While the children in the transition stage can have a more complete story structure and use longer language descriptions and psychological activities to record things; they tend to use different endings to express themselves and have more precise narratives.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Planning Office [grant number 2019BYY012].