Narrative abilities in “left-behind” ethnic minority children in China: Evidence from Kam-Mandarin bilingual children
Zhaizhen Kam village (Longsheng, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China). Photograph taken by Wenchun Yang in 2020. Click on image to access collection.
| Language | Kam (ISO639-3:kmc), Mandarin Chinese (ISO639-3:cmn) |
| Depositor | Wenchun Yang, Angel Chan, Natalia Gagarina |
| Affiliation | The Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, |
| Location | China |
| Collection ID | 0712 |
| Grant ID | 40.20.0.002SL |
| Funding Body | Fritz Thyssen Foundation |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/k6970w8o-5q3e-7699-9042-g15b2s31667x |
Summary of the collection
This deposit is part of the result of the project on narrative abilities in left-behind Kam-Mandarin bilingual children funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation between 2020 and 2022. This is a collaborative work of the principal investigator Wenchun Yang, Co-Investigators Angel Chan and Natalia Gagarina, and a group of native speakers who were involved in the data collection and transcription. The deposit consists of transcriptions of stories from left-behind Kam-Mandarin bilingual children aged 5 to 9. Forty stories were elicited by using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), 20 in Kam and 20 in Mandarin.
Group represented
The group represented in this deposit is Kam-Mandarin bilingual children from Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China. Children acquired Kam (also known as Dong) as their home language and Mandarin as the second language.
Special characteristics
The stories were elicited by the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). MAIN contains four picture-based parallel stories, Cat, Dog, Baby Bird and Baby Goat. Children retold the Cat and Dog stories after listening to model stories and told the Baby Bird and Baby Goat stories without model stories. The participants were 5 to 9 years old Kam-Mandarin bilingual children with Kam as home language and Mandarin as L2. They were so called left-behind children who stayed in the rural areas while their parents went to cities for employments, and were taken care of by their grandparents and relatives. Each child narrated MAIN stories in both Kam and Mandarin.
Collection contents
The collection consists of transcriptions of 40 stories elicited by the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) from 20 Kam-Mandarin bilingual children aged 5 to 9, including
– 20 stories in Mandarin
– 20 stories in Kam
Collection history
The data were collected and transcribed in 2020.
Other Information
The transcriptions of Kam stories are in Chinese characters as Kam does not have a widely used writing system.
Acknowledgement and citation
This project was supported by a research stipend by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation to Wenchun Yang (Ref. 40.20.0.002SL). Users of any part of the collection should acknowledge Wenchun Yang as the principal investigator and Angel Chan and Natalia Gagarina as the Co-Investigators. Other contributor who collected or transcribed the data or was involved in any other way should be acknowledged by name. All information on contributors is available in the metadata.
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Wenchun Yang, Angel Chan, and Natalia Gagarina. 2022. Narratives in left-behind Kam-Mandarin bilingual children. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/z5909c9o-7p3a-4898-5444-u15z7p41763r. Accessed on [insert date here].
