This research study examined and compared the performance of primary one students in terms of their oral and written proficiency in Chinese for the same picture description task. A total of 273 primary one students participated in an elicitation task where they were asked to describe a picture through speech and in written sentences. Their narrative abilities can be scored in terms of their standard in vocabulary and sentence structure, more specifically the total number of words, repeated words and unique words that were used by the primary one students. The results displayed a significant gap between their oral and written narrative abilities, whereby their oral proficiency was evidently more developed as compared to their written proficiency.