Dr Fan Jing Hua, Liu Zeng Jiao

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Abstract

Contemporary language teaching has highlighted story-form as one of the principle for curriculum and material design. Storytelling has been one important pedagogical tool as a form of both knowledge transfer and construction, especially in lower primary schools when language proficiency and story grammar are interwoven in the process of knowledge acquisition. In contemporary language acquisition research, however, the acquisition of story grammar is usually taken as one aspect of linguistic competence like Chomskyan Universal Grammar, while generally the structuralist and narratological findings have not been applied to the acquisition of story grammar. This paper tries to investigate how the lower primary pupils aged from 6 to 7 construct stories and hopes to describe the story grammar based on the narrative discourse segments of randomly selected 60 bilingual pupils in Singapore. The primary language of these unbalanced English-Chinese bilingual students is English while the narration is conducted in Mandarin Chinese so that the students may have a basic story grammar acquired from English as their "mental grammar" explorable when trying to tell stories in Chinese. The students are given some visual aids and they are prompted by the interviewer-facilitators to tell stories. The analysis find that some common event-generative nodes can be detected in the narrative segments and that while these nodes can be integrated into a general storyline in the prescribed story grammar they tend to be relatively independent and centrifugal. These nodes often lead to alternative storylines that are open-ended or freely linked. This finding shows that the prescriptive story grammar may not be universal as the structuralist claims suggest, or at least among the lower primary pupils, and the paper suggests that there should be a descriptive story grammar in the lower primary pupils (roughly before the critical period in the language acquisition research) and that story-telling as a form of language learning and knowledge acquisition at this age group may not necessarily follow the prescriptive story grammar but instead should be used as cognitive methods for explorations into language and knowledge.