Proficiency and compensatory strategies in bilingual children’s Mandarin Chinese narrative

Narrative skills play an important role in children’s reading, communication, and critical thinking. Most studies on narrative skills are based on monolingual children from middle- to upper middle-class populations and few have examined bilingual children’s narratives outside of the western context. These factors may impose different sociocultural influences on children’s storytelling abilities. The current study focuses on English–Mandarin bilingual children in Singapore and explores: (1) how English–Mandarin bilinguals apply their Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency to a given narrative task and (2) the compensatory strategies they employ in their Mandarin narratives. Data was obtained from 186 K1 pre-schoolers (85 boys and 101 girls) aged four to five. Children’s Mandarin narrative skills were assessed with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al. in ZAS Pap Linguist 56:155–155, 2012. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.56.2019.414). Their macrostructural knowledge (e.g., story grammar) was scored with the MAIN coding scheme, and their microstructural knowledge (e.g., mean length of utterance) was calculated with CLAN. Children’s Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency (i.e., receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and semantic fluency) was assessed with standard tests. The results indicate that compared to children’s microstructural knowledge, their macrostructural knowledge was more influenced by their Mandarin competence. Children used a variety of strategies to compensate for their limited Mandarin competence, and the most frequently used ones were generalisation (e.g., all classifiers of nouns were “个”), codeswitching (at both the word and sentential levels), and sentential structural transfer.