Language socialisation of the child through caretaker-child personal narratives: a comparison of Thai and English

The present study reports preliminary findings on the elicitation strategiesused by Thai and English caretakers when eliciting past event narratives from preschoolers. Ten Thai and ten English-speaking caretaker-child dyads were recruitedfrom Bangkok, Thailand and from Sydney, Australia. Caretakers were asked to elicitpast event narratives from their children and the three best narratives were selected foranalysis. Elicitation strategies used by caretakers were coded into various categoriesbased on McCabe and Petersoti (1991), Minami (2002) and Chang (2003). Resultsrevealed common and culture-specific strategies. English-speaking caretakers in general provided more information, requested more evaluation, expressed more agreement and approval, revised and corrected children, whereas Thai caretakers used morecontextual, temporal information. Results are discussed in terms of educational implications and future research directions.