Trois (french)
Narrative writing - something that had been pushed into the deep recesses of my mind since nearly 5 years ago. As my group attempted to weave a simple story based on the 8 pictures given during our tutorial exercise, I was reminded of the fun I used to have while writing compositions back in primary and secondary school. =)
Given the stark contrasts between English and Chinese narratives, I started to wonder about the narrative styles which bilinguals will adopt. Since our class consists mainly of Singaporeans (and I assume most of us are proficient in both English and Chinese), perhaps our mini writing exercise can be considered a 'pilot study'?
It seems like most of our stories follow the typical English narrative style: having specific names for characters, providing sufficient background information, using an impressive range of activity verbs, and inserting lots of dialogue between characters. (Do correct me if I'm wrong, as I did not note down the stories and analyze them in detail; this is merely my general impression.)
However, listen carefully and we will find some typical Chinese narrative elements, such as the emphasis on specific time orientation and explicit moral statements (there was a group with 3 moral statements, if I remember correctly?).
This leads to a mini 'hypothesis' of mine - perhaps bilinguals tend to adopt the narrative style of the language they are writing in, but will still 'borrow' some of the narrative elements from the other language they know.
It might probably be due to the fact that school teachers teach English and Chinese compositional writing with slightly different methods (or at least, my teachers did). And they were pretty strict about it!
Strict in a very flexible way, yah.
For English teachers, they emphasized details and the famous "5Ws, 1H" - who, where, when, what, why, and how. Whereas Chinese teachers taught me to capture the essence of the essay with idioms and abstract notions, without dwelling too much on mundane details.
As for oral examinations (there's this component where students have to describe a picture verbally), we were taught to use elaborate descriptions of facial features and activity verbs for the English exam, but we always have to provide moral statements for the Chinese exam.
Can we continue to find similar differences in folklores, bedtime stories, and perhaps even movies?
Ah, I love how this module generates so many questions... (But the answers are not as easy to find!) =)
All of these seem to correspond with the differences between English and Chinese narratives as discussed in class. Hmmm. Were we brought up to write differently according to the language? Can we 'code-switch' between these two narrative styles or do they influence each other? This probably needs further research...
Also, how did these narrative styles emerge in the first place? Is it a reflection of culture, values, and the way we speak?
Also, how did these narrative styles emerge in the first place? Is it a reflection of culture, values, and the way we speak?
Can we continue to find similar differences in folklores, bedtime stories, and perhaps even movies?
Ah, I love how this module generates so many questions... (But the answers are not as easy to find!) =)
posted by chiewy at 12:12 PM
1 Comments:
I somewhat feel the same that English and Chinese teachers in primary schools emphasize on the use of different techniques to write a narrative or describe a picture orally. That's probably the reason why we may write narratives in Chinese and in English differently. A great point made, which is worth pursuing further.
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