CHAPTER 4 STUDY 1: THE NARRATION TASK
4.4 R ESULTS
In the narration task, students were asked to narrate the story ‘Frog, where are you?’
in Atayal. On account of the students’ lack of abundant vocabularies to narrate the story entirely in Atayal, they were allowed to code-mixed between Atayal and Mandarin.
However, several measures were also implemented to boost students’ use of Atayal. For example, in the teaching phase, the teachers taught the students most of the vocabularies and the structure of motion events that could be of use in the narration. The students had practiced vocabularies and motion event construction for many times in the teaching phase. Also, from the classroom observations before the experiment, we had observed that some students could understand short stories told by the teachers and answered in simple sentences. In addition, before narrating the story, the students were informed that
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those who used Atayal to tell the story could receive not only extra points, but also a big prize. However, it turned out that most of the students, especially the lower graders, narrated the story mostly in Chinese, mixing with only a few Atayal vocabularies.
Though all the motion event constructions had been taught in complete sentences repeatedly in the teaching phase, still, none of the students used a complete sentence to describe the motion events.
Following were examples of how students from each grade encoded a motion event by using the Atayal motion verbs, mhohtaw ‘to fall’, which was the most frequently-used verb in the collected narratives. As shown in the examples, students tended to code-mix between Chinese and Atayal. When students code-mixed in the motion event encoding, students placed the verb in the sentence-medial position, but not in sentence-initial position, which is the typical Atayal sentence structure. Therefore, even though the students encoded the motion with an Atayal verb, the construction was a Chinese sentence structure.
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(3) 4th grade_HKS
*CHI: 他從 llex mhotaw 下去
*CHI: 到了 gong 裡面
*CHI: Watan跟 hozil
*CHI: 從 gong
*CHI: 一直游一直游
*CHI: 游到一個木頭的後面
We now come to the main goal of the narration task, that is, to investigate how heritage language learners encoded motion events in the narration task. We first examined the motion verbs children expressed in Atayal in the narration task. Students produced 13 verbs in narrations. Of these verbs, seven spontaneous motion verbs were used and five of them were taught in the teaching phase. Among the motion verbs, we were concerned about the path verbs and manner verbs that a trajectory of a moving agent was involved.
Among all the narrations, subjects produced one path verb and two manner verbs. More subjects made use of the path verb in their narratives. As revealed by the result in Table 4.3, the path verb, mhotaw ‘to fall’ was used by six subjects while mstopu’ ‘to jump’ and
mkaraw ‘to climb’ were used by only one or two subjects in the 4
th grade. Compared with path verbs, manner verbs seemed to be more difficult for these children to acquire in a motion event denoting a movement of the agent.We further investigated how children used the path verb mhotaw ‘to fall’ as
presented in examples (1), (2), and (3), and how they used the manner verbs mstopu’ ‘to jump’ and mkaraw ‘to climb’ in examples (4) and (5) below.
In example (1), the subject used the Atayal verb hotaw ‘to fall’ to encode the motion;
however, she used a Chinese construction to specify the goal, i.e.掉到河邊裡面. In example (2), the subject used the word mhotaw ‘to fall’ to indicate the path of the motion and the deictic element. However, he introduced the source tree with Chinese, i.e. 從樹上.
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In this example, the Atayal verb was embedded in a construction which is often found in Mandarin motion event encoding, that is, Source+Manner+Path+Deixis (Lin, 2006).
Different from example (2), the subject in example (3) used the Atayal word mhotaw ‘to fall’ with the Chinese path and deictic components xia4qu4 ‘下去’. However, in Atayal, the path verb mhotaw ‘fall’ incorporates both the concepts of path and deixis. Therefore, the use of the Mandarin path and deictic elements xia4qu4 was redundant in this case.
From the examples (1) to (3), the heritage language learners were found to use the Atayal path verb in Chinese constructions, and did not really grasp the meaning of the Atayal verb mhotaw completely.
In example (4) and (5), we examined the subjects’ use of manner verbs mkaraw and
mstopu’. As shown in these examples, subjects seemed to use these manner verbs in
Chinese constructions. In example (4), the subject could be encoding the motion event with the Chinese construction 爬到樹上, but just replaced the word 爬 ‘climb’ with the Atayal word mkaraw ‘to climb’. However, it was worth noting that the word mkaraw‘climb’ in Atayal can mean ‘to climb up’ or ‘to climb down,’ according to its context. For example, mkaraw qhoniq qu’ mqu’ can be interpreted as either ‘The snake climbed up the tree’ or ‘The snake climbed down the tree’. The finding that the subject in example (4) encode path independently of the Atayal verb mkaraw suggested that the subject did not know how to use these Atayal verbs well. Also in example (5), it was shown that na4 ge
‘那個’ followed by mstopu’ ‘jump’ functioned as a pause (Huang, 1999) for the subject to search for the Atayal vocabulary with the meaning of ‘jump’. From examples (4) and (5), it was found that children encoded the motion events in Chinese and tried to translate some of the words into the Atayal vocabularies they knew.
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(4) 4th grade_HYP
*CHI: Watan弄
*CHI: mkaraw 爬
*CHI: mkaraw 到樹上
(5) 4th grade_HYP
*CHI: 看到那個 patong 那個 mstopu’
*CHI: 那個小男生 跟小狗狗
Since no complete Atayal sentence was produced in children’s narratives, the use of each Atayal word was then closely examined. Words used by the subjects in the narratives were listed in Table 4.3. This table provided the number of users and the number of tokens for each word. The number of users provided a clearer view to the use of each word among our subjects. Words of high occurrences were sometimes contributed by only a few subjects. For example, tmux ‘to call’ and mita ‘to see’, were used ten times and eight times respectively, but, actually, they were only used by two of the fourth graders. The number of tokens itself cannot tell us how many students among the subjects can really use it. Thus, the number of users should also be shown in the table.
Among 57 subjects (17 second graders, 21 third graders, 19 fourth graders), patong
‘frog’ and hozil ‘dog’ were the most frequently-used nouns. Forty-six subjects (81%) used the Atayal word patong ‘frog’ and thirty-six subjects (63%) used hozil ‘dog’. The most frequently-used predicate was the path verb, MHOTAW ‘to fall’ (the verb forms with or without AF voice affix, i.e. hotaw and mhotaw, were both included). Among all the subjects, only six subjects (11%) used the verb MHOTAW.
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Table 4.3
Words Occurred in the Narratives: Ranked by Number of Users
Atayal(1) Words that had been taught in the teaching phase were bold-faced.
(2) The capitalized PATONG in the parenthesis represents two forms of ‘frog’ in Atayal, i.e.
patong and qpatong.
mstopu’ jump 2 3
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The most frequently-used words, include patong ‘frog’, used by 81 percent of the subjects, and hozil ‘dog,’ used by 63 percent of subjects. The frequencies of other words dropped dramatically. For the remaining 42 words, each word was used by less than 15 percent of subjects. The results revealed that even after students were taught how to encode motion events in Atayal, few of them could really make use of them.
Subsequent lexical analysis was conducted to examine the distribution of different parts-of-speech in the production data. Words were categorized on the basis of their parts-of-speech, namely nouns, predicates, and others, according to its function in subject’s production. For example, qutux ‘one’ was classified into the category of Other, not in the category of Noun, since it functioned as a modifying quantifier in the subject’s narrative. Words of these three categories were listed in Table 4.4. Among the forty-four words, 60% were nouns (26 words), 30% were predicates (13 words), and 10% belonged to the category of others (5 words). As revealed, subjects used more nouns than
predicates.
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Table 4.4
Words Occurred in the Narratives: Categorized by Parts-of-Speech
Atayal English translation Atayal English translation Noun
Note: Words that had been taught in the teaching phase are bold-faced.
We were interested in the teaching effect; therefore we examined whether children had acquired words taught in the teaching phase and used these words in narratives. Table 4.5 demonstrated the subjects’ use of the vocabularies that were taught in the teaching
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phase. In the teaching phase, 33 words were taught, including 15 nouns, 16 verbs, and 2 words belonging to the category of Others. Analyses on the subjects’ narratives revealed that the subjects used 16 words that were taught in the teaching phase, including 11 nouns and 5 predicates. As shown in Table 4.5, the subjects had used 11 out of 15 nouns taught in the teaching phase to tell the story, while they only used 5 predicates among the 16 predicates taught in the teaching phase. The results suggested that subjects learned the newly-taught nouns faster and could make use of them better, in comparison with their use of the predicates. Nevertheless, if we further examined the total use of words, it was found that words taught in the teaching phase only accounted for one-third of students’
production of vocabularies. Two-thirds were from the subjects’ spontaneous productions, which indicated that students had possessed some Atayal vocabulary knowledge before the experiment.
From the data collected, it was clearly shown that our subjects used very little Atayal vocabulary. Some children did not even use any Atayal word in their narratives. Only 65% of the second graders used at least one Atayal word in the narratives. However, increases in the number of narratives that contained at least one Atayal word were found in the 3rd and 4th graders, as shown in Table 4.6, which indicated a maturation trend of children’s general performance in Atayal.
Table 4.5
Subjects’ Use of the Vocabularies that were Taught in the Teaching Phase
Noun (Taught) Predicate (Taught) Other (Taught)Used Non-used Used Non-used Used Non-used
11 (73%) 4 (27%) 5 (31%) 11 (69%) 0 (0%) 2 (100%)
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Table 4.6
The Number of Narratives that Contained at Least One Atayal Word
2nd grade 3rd grade 4th grade Number of narratives containing at least one
Atayal word 11 (65%) 20 (95%) 17 (89%)
Total number of narratives 17 (100%) 21 (100%) 19 (100%)
As for the number of Atayal words used, a tremendous increase was found while we compared the second graders with the third graders or the fourth graders. Among the second graders, only seven Atayal words were used, while among the third and fourth graders, more than twenty-seven words were used, as reported in Table 4.7. The 3rd and the 4th graders had similar performances, and only manifested a minor difference in the use of predicates. That is, the 4th graders used more predicates than the 3rd graders.
In the narration task, we only observed some production data at the lexical level, but not at the sentence level. The limited production data prevented us from digging deeper into how these heritage language learners understood the motion events; therefore the comprehension tasks were implemented to further assess children’s knowledge of the motion event constructions. In comprehension tasks in Study 2, the second graders were excluded, because the subjects’ performances in the narration task revealed that children might have better knowledge of the motion event constructions until they were older.
Therefore, in the comprehension tasks in Study 2, we included students from the 4th to the Table 4.7
The Number of Atayal Words Used in the Narratives of Different Age groups
2nd grade 3rd grade 4th grade
Noun 5 17 18
Predicate 2 7 9
Other 0 3 3
Total 7 27 30
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6th grade, i.e. the 3rd grade to the 5th grade in the narration task in Study 1.