Affiliation:
1. Jiangsu Normal University
2. University of Oxford
Abstract
Abstract
This study investigated the influence of the audience and narrator’s gender on spoken narratives produced by Chinese children.
Sixty typically developing five- and six-year-old children were evenly divided into three groups. Each group was assigned one
audience, being a teacher, a same-age peer, or a younger peer. The children were asked to view a wordless picture book and retell
the story to the audience. The results showed that the children tended to use more macrostructure elements when telling stories to
same-age peers, with boys using more macrostructure elements than girls. Girls used more words and more events when narrating to
younger peers, whereas boys used more words, more diverse words, and more evaluative language when narrating to teachers. In
addition, the children marked temporality more in narratives to younger peers than to same-age peers. The findings indicated that
the audience and narrator’s gender influence the narrative production of Chinese children.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Social Sciences (miscellaneous),History,Education