In past research, the form of Japanese children's personal narratives was found to be distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience in particular (Minami & McCabe, 1991). Conversations between mothers and children in the two cultures were examined in order partly to account for the way in which cultural narrative style is transmitted to children. Comparison of mothers from the two cultures yielded the following salient contrasts: (1) In comparison to the North American mothers, the Japanese mothers requested proportionately less description from their children.(2) Both in terms of frequency and proportion, the Japanese mothers gave less evaluation and showed more verbal attention to children than did North American mothers.(3) Japanese mothers pay verbal attention more frequently to boys than to girls. In addition, at five years, Japanese children produce 1-22 utterances per turn on average, while North American children produce 2-00
Conversational narratives of 17 Japanese children aged 5 to 9 were analyzed using stanza analysis (Gee 1985;Hymes 1982). Three distinctive features emerged: (1) the narratives are exceptionally succinct; (2) they are usually free-standing collections of three experiences; (3) stanzas almost always consist of three lines. These features reflect the basic characteristics of haiku, a commonly practiced literary form that often combines poetry and narrative, and an ancient, but still ubiquitous game called karuta, which also displays three lines of written discourse. These literacy games may explain both the extraordinary regularity of verses per stanza and the smooth acquisition of reading by a culture that practices restricted, ambiguous, oral-style discourse. The structure of Japanese children's narratives must be understood within the larger context of omoiyari "empathy" training of Japanese children. Empathy training may account for the production, comprehension, and appreciation of ambiguous discourse in Japanese society. (Cultural differences in discourse style, the relationship among oral language, literacy, and literature)
There are many ways to tell a story, but whether a story is good or bad depends on whether or not the listener/reader can comprehend all that the speaker/ writer wants to convey in his or her story. This study examines the characteristics of stories that native speakers of given languages consider to be good. Forty English-Japanese bilingual children ages six to twelve were asked to narrate a picture storybook in both English and Japanese. Also involved in the study were 16 adult native Japanese speakers and 16 adult native English speakers who evaluated the stories produced by the bilingual children. An analysis of narratives receiving high ratings from evaluators shows that most stories considered good in English or Japanese should be lengthy stories with a large and varied vocabulary, and should be told in the past tense. In addition to those similarities in effective stories told in the two languages, we also found dissimilarities between "good" stories in English and "good" stories in Japanese. English evaluators felt that relating a series of events in chronological order is only one part of a good story. Providing evaluative comments (i.e., statements or words that tell the listener/reader what the narrator thinks about a person, place, thing, or event) is an indispensable part of telling good stories. So, in stories in English, aside from the standard expectation of a sequential series of events, providing the listener with emotional information is considered equally important. On the other hand, Japanese speakers accepted stories that emphasize a temporal sequence of action with less emphasis on nonsequential information, especially evaluative descriptions, and which effectively use passive forms and subject-referencing markers to enable a clear chronological sequence of events. Because the standards of what makes a good story may differ in the home and school languages/cultures, and because of the complex nature of such differences as shown in this study, itRequests for further information should be directed to Masahiko Minami, 84 Masahiko Minami seems advisable that schools intervene and support the development of bilingual children's skills in the use of the mainstream culture's standards.There are many ways to tell a story, but whether a story is good or bad depends on whether the listener/reader can comprehend all that the speaker/writer wants to convey. Imagine a seven-year-old Japanese American boy who sounds like a native speaker of English but was, in reality, raised in a Japanese-speaking family and whose first language is, in fact, Japanese. When asked by his monocultural American teacher whether he has hurt himself, the boy might answer, "Yes, I have. " The teacher takes pains to ask him to continue his injury story; the boy finally says, "I was playing on the monkey bars. And I got a splinter. And I had it pulled out. " Because empathic consideration for others is highly valued in Japanese culture (Doi, 1973), even though the seven-year-old does not give any evaluative comments about his inj...
This study analysed oral personal narratives of 20 middle-class Japanese preschoolers, half of them four years old and half five, and their mothers, using stanza analysis and high point analysis. The patterning in stanzas revealed that, compared to four-yearolds, five-year-olds have begun to use the form of adult-like narratives. High point analysis indicated that compared to fouryear-olds, five-year-olds have begun to evaluate in the form of adult-like narratives. The results suggest that the preschool years, during which various narrative components evolve, represent a period of extremely rapid development in the child's acquisition of narrative capacity. They also illustrate that from early childhood on, Japanese children learn the narrative mode of discourse valued by their mothers. 339
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