Culture-Specific Language Styles: The Development of Oral Narrative and Literacy (Child Language and Child Development) - Softcover

Minami, Masahiko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185359573X ISBN 13: 9781853595738

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2002

Synopsis

Communication skills are considered extremely important for the development, preservation, and transmission of culture to future generations, and incorporate the complicated relationship between language and culture. This book focuses on an analysis of personal narratives by Japanese pre-school children. The book also analyzes mother-child narratives and joint book-reading activities.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Masahiko Minami has written extensively on psycho/sociolinguistics with a particular emphasis on cross-cultural comparisons of language development and narrative/discourse structure. He has published significant contributions to works covering cultural constructions of meaning, childcare quality in Japan, and East Asian students' experiences in U.S. classrooms.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Culture-specific Language Styles

The Development of Oral Narrative and Literacy

By Masahiko Minami

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2002 Masahiko Minami
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-573-8

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Part 1: Theoretical and Ethnographic Background, 
1. Introduction, 1, 
2. Literature Review, 13, 
3. Research Design: Methodology and Basic Concepts, 52, 
Part 2: Analyses of the Personal Narratives Conducted Between Japanese Preschool Children and Adults, 
4. Monologic Narrative: Narrative Development, 76, 
5. Monologic Narrative Structure in Japanese, 109, 
Part 3: Mother-Child Narrative Interactions, 
6. Parental Narrative Elicitation Styles, 154, 
7. Cross-Cultural Comparison of Parental Narrative Elicitation, 193, 
Part 4: Development of Literacy in Japanese Children, 
8. Styles of Parent-Child Book-Reading in Japanese Families, 238, 
Part 5: Conclusions Derived from the Current Study and a Discussion of Topics for Future Studies in Narrative Discourse, 
9. Conclusion and Implications, 259, 
References, 290, 
Index, 310, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Problems

In any society, a child's life is driven in part by particular models of what parents believe to be the 'good life' and the 'ideal individual.' Culture has a variety of implications in this respect. To begin with, culture is defined as consisting of a set of attitudes, beliefs, customs and values shared by a group of people, communicated from one generation to the next via language or some other means of communication (Fischer & Lazerson, 1984; Matsumoto, 2000; Super & Harkness, 1980). This definition suggests that culture is learned behavior, shaping attitudes and encouraging some types of behaviors more than others. Conversely, newborn babies have no culture; as they grow, they gradually acquire a particular set of behavioral patterns that are appropriate for their culture. In this way, culturally distinct parental goals and plans for child development are implemented in a wide variety of forms. Children from different cultures develop differently according to the cultural standards endorsed by the adults around them. Thus, the process of parents' socializing their children following specific cultural norms and, in turn, children's learning culturally appropriate behaviors is what socialization is all about.

This book focuses on language socialization; by acquiring linguistic knowledge, which is immersed in sociocultural knowledge, children become socialized through language. In fact, language socialization is defined by Ochs (1996) as 'the process whereby children and other novices are socialized through language, part of such socialization being a socialization to use language meaningfully, appropriately, and effectively' (p. 408). Because 'part of acquiring language is the acquisition of the social meaning of linguistic structures' (Ochs, 1986, p. 7), in this book culture is considered in relation to linguistic/discursive phenomena.

In divergent cultural settings, we can indeed observe dissimilarities in parental expectations and in communicative styles, and, accordingly, examining various aspects of children's pragmatic and sociolinguistic development becomes imperative. That is, cross-cultural differences in socialization often become discernible when observing that children in different cultures have to become competent in the appropriate pragmatic use of their language, as well as the grammar and vocabulary. In this way, the acquisition of a culture-specific communicative style – i.e. linguistic knowledge plus knowledge of the social rules of language use known as communicative competence (Hymes, 1974a) – plays a significant role in the process of language acquisition and the development of language skills, such as the choice of topics, rules of turn taking, modes of storytelling and rules of politeness (Heath, 1982, 1983, 1986). As adults, however, most of the pragmatic rules are so culturally ingrained that we are not even aware that we are following certain systematic rules.

Children learn grammatical patterns during the course of face-to-face interaction; interaction is viewed as a crucible that forges knowledge of the language that children are expected to acquire. Narrative is typically considered a text in which the narrator relates a series of events – either real or fictive – in the order in which they happened. Furthermore, narratives are a communicatively driven form of discourse in that individuals tell stories to one another and not to themselves (Stavans, 1996). For the purpose of investigating cross-cultural differences, parent–child interactions, especially their narrative interactions as connected and extended discourse, provide good examples. To begin with, conversation between parents, particularly mothers, and their young children forms the context in which narrative discourse abilities typically emerge. Snow and Goldfield (1981) present ways in which, through book-reading interactions with adults, young children learn what questions to ask and what responses to provide; for instance, illustrating that particular aspects of language use that parents emphasize will be eventually adopted by children, these researchers documented one child's spontaneously supplying information that his mother had previously inquired about, over several sessions of reading the same book. This methodology focusing on narrative can be applied to language acquisition, particularly the foundation of communicative competence (Hymes, 1974a), with reference to mother–child interactions.

Furthermore, through conversational interactions, parents transmit to their young children not only language-specific representational forms and rules but also culture-specific interaction styles, such as culturally nurtured canonical narrative discourse patterns. Bruner (1990) specifically hypothesizes that (1) at an early stage of development, the child, interacting with the caregiver, enters into the world of meaning construction, and (2) the meaning creation process in narrative discourse is closely related to specific forms of cultural representation. Following his hypothesis, we will be able to claim that while people from virtually all cultures tell stories, at the same time, they shape culturally canonical forms of narrative, narrative thinking, and interpretations through social interactions. Thus, as Bruner puts it, 'Narrative structure is even inherent in the praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression' (p. 77) and 'four-year-olds may not know much about the culture, but they know what's canonical and are eager to provide a tale to account for what is not' (pp. 82–83).

Cross-cultural comparison of narrative productions has been addressed in previous studies. For example, Au (1993) describes 'talk story,' an important speech event for Hawaiian children in their local speech communities. 'During talk story children present rambling narratives about their personal experiences, usually enhanced with humor, jokes and teasing. The main characteristic of talk story is joint performance, or cooperative production of responses by two or more speakers' (Au, 1993, p. 113). Along similar lines, from her observation of 'sharing time' classes, Michaels (1981, 1991) draws the distinction between the ways that African American and European American children describe past events in their narratives. Further examining the same data as Michaels used, Gee (1985, 1986a, 1989a, 1989b, 1991b) illustrates differences in narrative between an African American girl and a European American girl; he categorizes the former as an oral-strategy (or poetic) narrative and the latter as a literate-strategy (or prosaic) narrative. It is thus critical to consider cultural differences in the ways in which children structure their oral personal narratives.

Despite widespread interest in emerging narrative discourse competence, we lack information on how young children acquire culture-specific forms of narrative. To begin with, although research focusing on cross-cultural comparison of narrative studies already exists, much of that research addresses cultural differences within the United States. Furthermore, data from cultures using languages other than English are very limited, except for a small number of studies such as Hymes's (1981, 1982, 1985, 1990) work with Native Americans and Schieffelin and her colleagues' (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin, 1986, 1990; Schieffelin & Eisenberg, 1984) investigation of the language acquisition and socialization process of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. We know next to nothing about how these different styles are acquired in other countries and other languages.

The Theoretical Framework: Research Questions

In an effort to understand children's acquisition of pragmatic and sociolinguistic functions, this book examines how culturally specific aspects of young Japanese children's narrative discourse skills develop and eventually lead to literacy. As mentioned above, although previous anthropological studies have argued that different cultures adopt different approaches in talking with children about past events, there has been relatively little investigation into cross-cultural issues in narrative discourse development.

Likewise, in spite of the fact that research focusing on Japanese conversation already exists, there is little or no work on young children's personal narratives; moreover, virtually no extended analyses of narrative discourse in the context of mother–child interactions are at present available. Previous researchers (e.g. LoCastro, 1987; Maynard, 1989; White, 1989; Yamada, 1992) have described a variety of characteristic features of Japanese conversational discourse, such as back-channel utterances, brief vocalization of acknowledgment like un ('yeah,' 'uh huh'). Introducing the notion of 'sync talk,' Hayashi (1988) sheds light on collaborative message as well as discourse construction by Japanese speakers. Maynard (1989) and Yamada (1992) claim that spoken Japanese is produced in smaller units than traditional grammatical constructs, such as a sentence or a clause. Analyzing narrative segments, Maynard (1993) further identifies a variety of Japanese linguistic devices and manipulative strategies that essentially convey a subjective emotion as well as an individual's shared feelings with others. Although these studies analyzed naturally occurring conversations and/or narrative discourse, their data represent adult–adult interaction. Their studies do not address the issue of how the origins of narrative discourse style can be traced back to conversations between parents and children. In reviewing the previous work in this area, therefore, it is clear that past research on this topic has substantial shortcomings.

Designed to address a gap that currently exists in this body of research, this book examines Japanese preschool children's personal narratives in the context of parent–child interaction. The major goal of the book is to enable readers to be fully aware of the relationship between oral language skills and literacy, more specifically, of the interactive nature of language development and the development of literacy skills in a particular sociocultural context. The book will, I believe, provide those who are interested in narrative – oral personal narratives in particular – with the background necessary to understand the essentials of narrative discourse development, which may relate to the development of literacy in later years. The book also dispels many myths and misconceptions, such that Japanese speakers are reticent or reluctant to talk. It is therefore designed to give readers suggestions for becoming more efficient in understanding culture-specific language styles. This book, which aligns with interactional sociolinguistics, explores parent–child interactions and examines the relationships between language and culture, and between language and context. In it, I try to answer the following overall research questions:

(1) How do young Japanese children develop narrative structure?

(2) How do Japanese parents guide their children in the acquisition of culture-specific styles of narrative?

(3) As a possible continuum between language development and the development of literacy skills, what kinds of verbal interactions take place between parents and their children in order to facilitate emergent literacy?

Question 1 above is closely related to the studies conducted by Minami (1990) and Minami and McCabe (1991). These studies have found that Japanese elementary school children tend to speak succinctly about collections of experiences rather than at length about any one experience in particular. Consider the following narrative produced by an eight-year, four-month-old boy Shun. [Note: (1) The narrative is analyzed, using a version of hierarchical verse/stanza analysis (Gee, 1985; Hymes, 1981), which I will describe in Chapter 4 of this book; (2) A stanza, which has a unitary perspective in terms of time, location and character, is considered a thematically constant unit.]

To non-Japanese ears, this story might sound to consist of three short, separate narratives, none of which is fully developed. We can notice, however, that there is a nice progression from the first shot (Stanza A) that must have surprised the boy and was painful, to the second one (Stanza B) that did not seem so bad, and to the third and the last one (Stanza C) that did not hurt at all. Thus, this narrative includes cohesive collections of several experiences that the boy had. Furthermore, injuries are contrasted to each other (using wa, which carries a contrastive meaning, as explained later in Chapter 5), and each injury is described in an elegantly succinct three-verse form. Because of the nature of the Japanese language, the speaker/narrator omits pronouns, copulas and other linguistic devices (shown in parentheses) that help the listener to easily identify and empathize with the speaker/narrator (for more details about the Japanese language, see Chapter 2).

Similarly, a seven-year, ten-month-old girl Sayaka juxtaposed three different types of injuries across sections: (1) an injury in kindergarten, (2) a fall off an iron bar, and (3) two hernia operations. [Note: A section is a larger topic/thematic unit than a stanza.]

As can be seen in Examples 1.1 and 1.2, stanzas mostly consist of three verses (which are basically defined as single clauses). We also notice that Stanza A in Example 1.1 and Stanzas A and C in Example 1.2 each consist of an orientation (i.e. the setting or context of a narrative), an action (i.e. a specific event or action), and an outcome (i.e. the result of a specific action). Minami (1990) and Minami and McCabe (1991) concluded that this three-verse, orientation-act-outcome pattern seems to represent the canonical pattern among Japanese elementary school children's oral personal narratives. Additionally, verse (c) in Stanza C (Example 1.2) shows that Sayaka, pointing at her chin, meant that the wound was cut open as if it were also a mouth. Japanese listeners may feel that her use of this metaphor is somewhat humorous, but at the same time can easily imagine how severe and painful her injury was, and thus deeply empathize with her. Finally, Sayaka not only juxtaposed three different types of injuries across sections, but in Section III, after her orientative comments that served as background information, she also juxtaposed her hernia operations chronologically across stanzas. Figure 1.1 illustrates Sayaka's story structures. Minami (1990) and Minami and McCabe (1991) thus also concluded that, in addition to the three-verse, orientation-act-outcome pattern, a presentation of multiple experiences – isolated but related incidents – across sections and/or stanzas is another feature of Japanese elementary school children's oral personal narratives. Moreover, the combination of these multiple life experiences are shaped into a whole unified story in Japanese elementary school children's narratives.

To summarize the above results, it can be said that, despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese elementary school children generally present free-standing collections of several experiences. These features are, as a matter of fact, in striking contrast to data gathered in a study of European American children, who talked at length about one particular experience at a time (Peterson & McCabe, 1983). Minami (1990) and Minami and McCabe (1991) have further found that the number of experiences that the Japanese children presented ranged from two to four. Question 1 raised above is an extension of this line of past research, and this book examines whether a tendency in narratives told by young Japanese preschool children is similar to that observed in previous studies.

With regard to questions two and three, if we hypothesize that the course of development is continuous and each individual is located at a single point along the developmental continuum, then, we can assume that the origins of the kinds of Japanese elementary school children's narrative patterning previously described can be traced back to conversations between parents and children in earlier years in their homes. That is, I believe that through dialogic narrative discourse such as dinner-table conversations, Japanese mothers' style of interviewing children about past events would form a template for Japanese children's narrative form. Bruner (1983) claims that 'by using language first for limited ends the child comes finally to recognize its more powerful, productive uses' (p. 7). As already stated, Bruner (1990) thus emphasizes that understanding specific properties of a narrative is important because, when we look at narrative components, we see how, in the process of interacting with others, the narrator constructs his or her logic. Applying this social interaction paradigm across cultures, the primary agent of cultural transmission, usually the mother, provides the child with particular narrative styles. Previous studies (e.g. Bruner, 1977, 1990; Bruner & Lucariello, 1989; Nelson, 1989) of children's early social interactions have identified two major hypotheses: (1) There are culture-specific patterns of social interactions in narrative production; and (2) A particular caregiver's narrative style shapes the child's narrative style, contributing to differences in mothers' and children's styles within a given culture. To put it in another way, individual differences in interaction style will be observed within a particular culture, but at the same time, adult narrative preferences are culturally determined. Questions two and three, therefore, investigate how young Japanese children interact with their mothers and, further, what kinds of culture-specific patterns of communication are involved in mother–child interactions.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 185359573X
• ISBN 13: 9781853595738
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328