A comparison of narrative skill in Spanish-English bilinguals and their functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking and English-only peers

Abstract

Purpose: The Spanish and English narrative skills of young (mean age = 5.65 years) Spanish-English bilinguals were compared to functionally monolingual Spanish and English-only speakers’ narrative skills, respectively ( n = 63). Method: Spanish and English oral retellings, elicited at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year, were transcribed and coded in terms of discourse- (story structure complexity), semantic- (word diversity) and grammatical-level (lexical and grammatical errors, revisions) skills. Data and analysis: Repeated measures ANOVAs, with Time (beginning-, end-of-year) and Language Status (bilingual and either functionally monolingual Spanish or English monolingual) or Language (English, Spanish) as factors, were used to compare children’s narratives in terms of story structure complexity, word diversity, errors and revisions. Pearson correlations examined the relation of revisions to word diversity and errors. Results: Time comparisons revealed significant gains in story structure complexity, with no statistically significant difference between bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ complexity scores. Bilinguals’ stories were also not different between English and Spanish. Yet, bilinguals included more errors in English than did English monolinguals, while engaging in a comparable number of revisions. Moreover, despite comparable error rates with Spanish monolinguals, bilinguals included more lexical and grammatical revisions in Spanish. Revisions and word diversity were positively correlated; no relation was found between revisions and errors. Conclusions: The relative differences in revisions between bilinguals’ and Spanish monolinguals’ narratives, versus English monolinguals’, highlight the linguistic strengths of bilinguals. In particular, bilinguals’ tendency to engage in revisions as they attempt to increase their language complexity, suggests that revisions require advanced linguistic knowledge, not language uncertainty. Originality: The children in this study were considered language minority learners in the United States. Moving past accounts of minority learners’ “low” performance on oral language and reading comprehension, our study findings reveal evidence of “advanced” linguistic knowledge for bilingual speakers.

Parenting Contributions to Latinx Children’s Development in the Early Years

“…Latinx families have a rich tradition of storytelling, and Latinx children are particularly good at telling stories. Descriptive studies show that Latinx children have strong narrative skills that enable them to share and produce stories in a coherent way (Gaámez and González 2019).…”

A multidimensional approach to Spanish–English bilingual preschoolers’ narrative skills (Un enfoque multidimensional de las habilidades narrativas de los niños preescolares bilingües inglés/español)

“…The purpose of macro-structural analysis is to determine how bilinguals organize their narratives in each language and how it is related to monolinguals´ narrative structure. The findings strongly suggest that Spanish-English bilingual children show similar narrative skills to those of their monolingual peers (Fiestas & Peña, 2004;Gámez & González, 2019;Uccelli & Páez, 2007). However, in these studies, narrative skills are only assessed in terms of story grammar scores, a measure that is not very sensitive to the complexities of narrative discourse (Heilmann et al, 2010, p. 155), and it does not account for other fundamental aspects of narratives, such as the use of evaluative language, a tool for getting the point of the story across and motivating the sequence of events (Montanari, 2004;Shiro, 1997).…”

Narrative language development of Persian-English bilingual children attending an immersion preschool

“…The productivity measures included number of utterances and number of different words (NDW) produced. The sentence organization measures included mean length of utterance in words (MLU-w) and percentage of grammatical utterances [37,38]. Bedore et al [36] found that language ability based on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment [39] was highly correlated with all productivity and organization measures (except number of utterances) in English and Spanish.…”

“…Although there is an increasing number of investigations of narrative language development of bilingual children, studies have primarily included Spanish-English bilingual children [36,37,40,41]. Very few studies have examined the narrative language development of other bilingual populations, such as Persian-English speaking children.…”