Learning-skill stories completion: A study on the development of 3–6-year-old children's narratives

Abstract

The development of children's narrative language is an essential part of their language development, which has a unique value to children's future learning and growth. Many research studies focus on children's narrative ability, but few focus on the completion of Chinese children's stories. In this study, 191 Chinese children aged 3–6 years old in the Shanghai area were selected to collect a story corpus by using the international and general completion pictures of learning stories, supplemented with the method of corpus study to explore the characteristics of children's narrative language development in the learning-skill stories. The study found that the development of vocabulary, syntax, and other aspects of 3–6-year-old children showed an apparent upward trend. The variety of words, the types, and the frequency of nouns and adjectives increased with age. Regarding the perspective of syntactic analysis, the critical stage in the development of syntactic length was about 5 years old. The narrative situation of the learning-skill stories could help children to show a better narrative level. At the age of 3–6, the story structure of children's learning-skill stories gradually became complete and three-dimensional with age, and the richness of children's life experiences was an essential factor in promoting the integrity of the story structure. In the Chinese context, reactive sequences and abbreviated episodes were the main types of story structure in children's narration. The narratives of children's learning-skill stories were influenced by Chinese culture.