Lam, Cindy Man-FongCindy Man-FongLamDr. CHAN Kin WingWong, Sheung PingSheung PingWong2025-07-252025-07-252024Lam, M. F., Chan, K. W., & Wong, S. P. (14.6.2024). Variation in the Chinese oral narrative abilities of non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong: A sociolinguistic perspective. TCCSL International Conference 2024, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.https://www.scribd.com/document/743473757/TCCSL%E6%9C%83%E8%AD%B0%E6%89%8B%E5%86%8A%E7%B5%82%E7%A8%BFhttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/24097Oral narration is an important medium for generating naturalistic speech data to examine language learners' linguistic performance. Previous studies investigating the spoken Chinese narratives of non- Chinese speaking (NCS) students in Hong Kong (Chan et al., 2023; Zhu, 2019) have focused on primary school students speaking in the majority language of Cantonese, capturing language proficiency during a stage of significant linguistic and cognitive development. This study addresses the research gap on variation in Chinese oral language proficiency among advanced NCS learners by examining secondary students' ability to narrate in both Cantonese and Putonghua.<br> The current study adopts a quantitative approach to analyse oral narratives from 57 NCS secondary students (ages 11-19, mean age = 14.59 years) of diverse ethnic backgrounds across four schools. Spoken narratives were elicited through students narrating the wordless illustrated storybook Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969), with a native Cantonese and Putonghua-speaking linguist (SPW) transcribing them to enable statistical analysis. Values for narrative duration and speech token count were then calculated as holistic measures of oral language performance.<br> Preliminary findings show that despite 35 students (61.40%) reporting having learned Putonghua in school for at least 3 years, only 3 students (5.26%) successfully narrated the story in Putonghua. While all participating students produced a Cantonese narrative, considerable variation was observed for performance measures in relation to demographic factors. On average, older students spoke for a shorter time but produced more tokens, indicating a faster speech rate than younger students. Female students spoke for longer and produced more tokens than male students did. Finally, Cantonese learning experience was proportional to token quantity. The observed variation in oral narrative abilities among NCS students in Hong Kong provides empirical insights for informing educational policies and instructional practices to enhance their language development and communication skills.enHong KongNon-Chinese Speaking (NCS) StudentsOral NarrativeSpoken ChineseTeaching Chinese As a Second LanguageConference Paper