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ENQUIRE PROJECT DETAILS BY GENERAL PUBLIC |
| Project Details |
| Funding Scheme : | General Research Fund | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Number : | 18400914 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(English) : | Narrative development in school-age South Asian children in Hong Kong | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(Chinese) : | 香港南亞裔學童的敘事能力發展 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(English) : | Prof Cheung, Hin Tat | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(Chinese) : | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Department : | Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Institution : | The Education University of Hong Kong | ||||||||||||||||||||
| E-mail Address : | hintat@eduhk.hk | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Tel : | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Co - Investigator(s) : |
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| Panel : | Humanities, Social Sciences | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject Area : | Psychology and Linguistics | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Exercise Year : | 2014 / 15 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Fund Approved : | 668,800 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Status : | Completed | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Completion Date : | 31-12-2017 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Objectives : |
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| Abstract as per original application (English/Chinese): |
This proposed study will examine the development of Cantonese narrative in ethnic minority children of Hong Kong with special focus on three sub-groups, namely, Indian, Pakistani, and Nepalese, who are commonly called South Asians (SA hereafter). Despite public concerns and the recent efforts of the Hong Kong government to help these children develop their language proficiency in Chinese, their oral narrative in Cantonese, which is an important component for success in school, has not been duly examined and documented. The absence of such research evidence could hinder the development of an effective Chinese-language education program for ethnic minority children.
According to Bruner (1991), a narrative is a main mode of human thought in which human actions and intentions are interpreted and organized with internal consistency and social value. A narrative is an important tool for socialization (Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997) and the transmission of cultural knowledge (Campbell, 1988). The development of narrative begins from the personal narratives of children with support from adults (McCabe & Peterson 2004). In addition to social interactions with adults, language and cognition are major determinants of the narrative development in children; with language and cognition, children organize and refer to events that are understood as socially meaningful (Nelson, 1996; Bohanek, Fivush, & Duke, 2006). After initial explorations of personal narratives, children can advance to the development of decontextualized speech, which is the ability to speak about and understand events in the past or in the future and a major precursor to literacy development (Tabors et al., 2001; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998).
To examine the development of Cantonese narrative in SA children in Hong Kong, this project will adopt a cross-sectional correlational design in which children's narratives will be collected at two different time points with 10 months interval. Three groups of primary school SA children in grades 1, 3, and 5 (each with 30 children) will be examined. Age-matched native Cantonese children from the same school will be tested as controls. Two elicitation tasks, personal experience sharing and picture-story retelling, will be used to collect narrative samples. Standardized oral Cantonese and Chinese assessment tools will be adopted to investigate their contributions to narrative development. |
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| Realisation of objectives: | This project investigated the development of oral Cantonese narrative in three sub-groups of ethnic minority children in Hong Kong, namely, Indian, Pakistani, and Nepalese, commonly known as South Asians (SA hereafter). Ninety SA children, from age 7 to age 14 were examined, with another sixty age-matched native Cantonese children tested as controls. HKCOLAS, a standardized oral Cantonese test, a narrative elicitation task and a Chinese reading test were administered twice to each participant with a 10-month interval in between. Due to the big variations in these children's oral Cantonese, comparisons between age groups did not yield any meaningful results. Instead, regression analyses were conducted with data collected in the first year as predictors of their narrative performance in the second year. Contrary to the impression that written Chinese is the sole barrier of these SA children in their schooling, the results show that most of these South Asian children performed poorly in their spoken Cantonese. Of all the linguistic variables examined, their vocabulary is the weakest and showed little growth during the period of investigation. SA children made some progress in their Cantonese grammar, which is also believed to be the contributing factor to their gain in the story-retelling task in the second year. With these results, the four objectives of the project were fully achieved and the major findings are highlighted as below. Objective 1 - To compare the L2 narrative development of school-age SA children with that of age-matched native Cantonese controls; By using the sub-test of HKCOLAS, a picture-story retelling task, the narrative performance of SA children from age 7 to age 14 was examined. According to the norm data of HKCOLAS, most SA children's performance was 2 SD below their age-matched peers while the controls, as expected performed within the normal range. Objective 2 - To examine whether uneven profiles exist in the Cantonese narrative development of SA children at micro- and macro-structure levels According to the results of the narrative task, most SA children produced barely acceptable stories. At macro level fewer attempts and actions were mentioned. At micro level, simple declarative sentences, mixed with sentence fragments, were produced. It is such a 'flat' profile, that the term 'uneven profile' is barely applicable. The most unexpected finding is that while they made some good progress in grammar, their oral vocabulary is much weaker and did not show any significant gain in 10 months. This uneven growth at the micro-level is quite different from what had been reported in the second language learning literature, that vocabulary grows before grammar. Future investigation may include receptive vocabulary test as the expressive vocabulary test used in this study could be too challenging and cannot reflect SA children's minute gain in word learning within one year. Objective 3 - To examine the role of written Chinese proficiency in the development of Cantonese narrative in SA children A Chinese reading test was used to access SA children's written Chinese proficiency. SA children were asked to perform a read-aloud task in which written characters of the test items used in the oral vocabulary test that they received earlier were used as stimuli. Results from regression analyses showed that their performance in reading Chinese in the first year did not predict their oral narrative scores in the second year. Further analyses showed that many SA children cannot name the objects but they can read the constituent characters, such 'car; in 'car park', and 'sky' in 'sky bridge'. This is another interesting finding that have not been reported in the literature. Objective 4 - To examine the role of L2 vocabulary and grammar in the development of Cantonese narrative in SA children Only SA children's receptive grammar of Oral Cantonese in the first year can predict the narrative score in the second year, with an R square of 0.136. However, some non-significant growth in vocabulary is also observed. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Summary of objectives addressed: |
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| Research Outcome | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Major findings and research outcome: | This project examined the development of Cantonese narrative skills of in school-age children with south Asia background. Ninety SA children, from age 7 to age 14 SA were tested with a standardized oral Cantonese test and a self-developed narrative elicitation task. Their growth in oral Cantonese was measured at two time points, with a 10- month interval in between. Sixty age-matched children who spoke Cantonese as their first language were also tested as controls. The overall results showed that these SA children performed poorly in all language tasks and most of their scores were two years below their age-expectation levels. While they did show some progress in the test of receptive Cantonese grammar, there was no significant gain in their expressive vocabulary. They also did better when they were asked again to retell a story in the second year of the study. Regression analyses showed that their receptive grammar in the first year is a significant but weak predictor of their storytelling scores in the second year (R square = 0.14). Of the various linguistic components that were measured by the story-retelling task, SA children performed better in introducing referents and they did poorer in using connectives for encoding causality and temporality between events. Comparing the linguistic requirements of these two components, the challenge that SA children faced was a combination of syntactic and discourse-related matters. Besides, SA Children who were born in Hong Kong performed better than those who arrived at age 7 and older but the performance of those who came to Hong Kong before age 6 was not much inferior to the local-born group. An analysis of their language use in different domains revealed that children who used Cantonese outside classroom and across domains have better vocabulary, grammar and produced better stories. These findings suggested that when planning for the teaching and learning of Chinese to these SA children, in addition to the complex linguistic features of written Chinese, the role of oral Cantonese skills, in particular, as realized in their ‘integrative’ motivation, should not be overlooked. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Potential for further development of the research and the proposed course of action: |
Results from the survey of language use in SA children revealed that there was not a single language that can connect their life experience across domains. This is an aspect that should receive more attention when formulating educational programs for ethnic minority students. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Layman's Summary of Completion Report: | This project investigated the development of oral Cantonese narrative in three sub-groups of ethnic minority children in Hong Kong, namely, Indian, Pakistani, and Nepalese, who are commonly called South Asians (SA hereafter). Ninety SA children, from age 7 to age 14 were examined with another sixty age-matched native Cantonese children were tested as controls. HKCOLAS, a standardized oral Cantonese test and a narrative elicitation task were administered. Contrary to the general impression that written Chinese is the major barrier of these SA children in their schooling, the results show that most of these South Asian primary students performed poorly in their spoken Cantonese. They could conduct daily conversations with classmates and friends to express their basic needs of life but they cannot appropriate words and sentence patterns to express their experiences or paraphrasing that have been said, in particular, a lack of background information and clear causal relations of events. These shortcomings in narrative ability have greatly affected their classroom learning where Cantonese is a medium of instruction. Their deficit in oral Cantonese should be addressed before remedial program of the written language is provided. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Research Output | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Peer-reviewed journal publication(s) arising directly from this research project : (* denotes the corresponding author) |
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| Recognized international conference(s) in which paper(s) related to this research project was/were delivered : |
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| Other impact (e.g. award of patents or prizes, collaboration with other research institutions, technology transfer, etc.): |
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| SCREEN ID: SCRRM00542 |