How Narrative Skills Associate With Peer Relations: An Empirical Study on Chinese Primary School Children

How Narrative Skills Associate With Peer Relations: An Empirical Study on Chinese Primary School Children

Yiyuan Wang, Rong Yan, Miao Li, Meng Wu, Zihan Chen
Copyright: © 2024 |Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/IJPSS.343045
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Abstract

Narrative skills are essential for children's social development. However, existing research primarily focuses on narratives' impact on children's cognitive abilities, with limited attention given to the relationship between narrative skills and peer interactions. This study aims to explore how oral and written narrative skills are associated with peer relations from a social perspective. 166 Chinese primary school children were randomly assigned to tasks of oral and written narratives, as well as peer nominations. Results indicate that grade 5 students performed significantly better than grade 3 students in both written and oral narrative tasks. Moreover, the level of written narrative proficiency surpassed that of oral skills. Significant interactions were also found among grade level, gender, and narrative modes. Crucially, narrative skills exhibited positive correlations with peer nominations, with stronger correlations seen for written narratives. These findings have important implications for narrative research and language instruction.
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Present Study

To sum it up, there is a clear lack of empirical studies investigating the oral and written narrative skills simultaneously and how they are associated with children’s peer relations from a social perspective. Naturally, answering this question becomes the major objective of the present study. Given the different developmental pattern between oral and written narrative skills, we hypothesize that there will be significant age and gender differences between oral and written narratives levels. Moreover, oral narratives will have more significant impact on children’s peer relations than written ones since oral communication serves as the most common way for children’s social interactions. Specifically, the following two questions will be addressed:

  • RQ1: Are there any age and gender differences between written and oral narrative skills of Chinese children?

  • RQ2: To what extent do Chinese children’s narrative skills associate with their peer relations? Are there any differences in the effects of different narrative modes on peer relations?

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Methods

Participants

A total number of 166 children participated in this study. Eighty-three students were from third grade (Mage = 8.95, SD = 0.58, Male = 39, Female = 44) and 83 students from fifth grade (Mage = 10.73, SD = 0.57, Male = 49; Female = 34). They were all normally developing, Mandarin-speaking children who were randomly selected from a public primary school in southeast China.

Measurement

Written and Oral Narrative Tests

The written and oral narrative tests were adapted from Davidson et al.’s (2016) narrative measures designed to examine children’s social and narrative skills. Participants were required to complete personal written and oral narratives on the theme concerning peer engagement on the playground, in which children were expected to narrate how they planned to join the ongoing activity and get acquainted with unfamiliar peers. The length of their narratives was limited to 300 words/3 minutes for the third graders and 400 words/5 min for the fifth graders. To ensure the test's reliability, the task's difficulty level was assessed by two Chinese language teachers from the school, who were blind to the research hypothesis.

  • Peer Nomination Task. The peer nomination task of this study was used to measure each participating child’s peer relationship according to the negative and positive nominations received from others (Davidson et al., 2016).

Research Procedure

As shown in Figure 1, the experiment included two phases. In the first phase, students were divided into two groups in each grade to participate in oral or written narrative tests. In the second phase, all children were administered into the peer nomination task.

  • Phase 1 Written and Oral Narrative Test. The written and oral narrative tests were conducted in a quiet classroom, proctored by the head teachers. Before the task, all participants were provided detailed instructions to make sure each of them obtained a good understanding of the theme and task requirements. Then, the written narrative group was given 40 minutes to write a story. After they finished the test, the worksheets were collected. In contrast, the oral narrative group was given four to five minutes for preparation and was then required to produce a story individually. Their oral responses were recorded and transcribed for the final grading.

  • Phase 2 Peer nomination. After the narrative tests were completed, all participants were administered into a peer nomination task. First, a peer nomination form containing a list of names of all the students in the class was given to each participant with instructions to circle the names of three classmates they like most and another three they dislike the most. After completion, all nomination forms were collected and coded by the two experimenters independently. Each positive and negative nomination was given one positive and negative point, accordingly. Peer relationship was calculated as the absolute value of positive and negative nominations received by each participant. The total number of positive and negative nominations received was coded as the degree of attention from peers.

Figure 1.

Research Procedure

IJPSS.343045.f01

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