Narratives in Two Languages: Assessing Performance of Bilingual Children Vera Gutierrez-Clellen Linguistics and Education 13(2): 175–197

Professor, Speech Language Director, Bilingual Child Language Research Laboratory San Diego State University San Diego, California

Research Hypothesis  TD bilingual children who appear to speak two languages may demonstrate different levels of narrative development in L1 and L2.

Narratives in Spanish and in English  Both employ tense markers to differentiate background and foreground events  Narrative in English elaborate on motion events by stating their trajectory and manner of motion  Narratives in Spanish use verbs to mark changes of state or location  Subject marking is obligatory in English, but optional in Spanish

Participants  33 bilingual Spanish-English speakers  28 second graders in bilingual classrooms  5 second graders in English only classrooms  19 male, 14 female  7;3-8;7 years old  No history of language impairment in L1/L2

Methods  Teacher questionnaires  Parent questionnaires  Spontaneous narratives  Story recall task  Story comprehension task

Spontaneous Narratives

Story Recall Task

Story Comprehension Task

Results

Quantitative analysis

Story Recall zscores

Story Comprehension zscores

Qualitative Analysis: Story Recall  Seven children performed below their bilingual peers in story recall.  The same children demonstrated limited performance on story comprehension questions.

Child #306 “The lady was scared of the tiger. And he put food what he could eat. And the tiger said thank you for the food and the music. And he go to sleep.”

Narrative Proficiency

Discussion  Children used their grammatical knowledge in each language without apparent difficulty.  Spontaneous narratives showed they were capable of producing narratives containing temporal and causal sequences in both languages.  Cross-linguistic differences found only when using recall tasks.  Most children showed greater recall and comprehension in English, but not all.

Implications  Assessment of narrative abilities in both languages will rule out or suggest language impairment.  For some children the best indicator of their narrative ability was Spanish, for others it was English.  Bilingualism appears to a a containuum of proficiencies.