Narrative and Vocabulary Development of Bilingual Children From Kindergarten to First Grade: Developmental Changes and Associations Among English and Spanish Skills

Abstract

Purpose-Research has identified English oral language proficiency as being critical for bilingual students' literacy development. This study examines developmental patterns and associations among oral vocabulary and narrative skills in a longitudinal sample of 24 Spanish/English bilingual children from low socioeconomic backgrounds so as to further our understanding of the development of oral proficiency.Method-English and Spanish data were gathered using standardized vocabulary tests and narrative elicitation tasks provided to kindergartners and first graders. Narratives were coded for length using two measures of productivity and for quality at two levels: story score and language score. Descriptive, correlation, multivariate, and regression analyses were conducted.Results-Significant gains from kindergarten to first grade were found for all English oral language measures. Despite showing improvements in English vocabulary, the majority of children continued to score below the monolingual mean in first grade. For English narrative productivity, total number of different words (TDW) proved to be a sensitive developmental measure in contrast to total number of words (TNW). In Spanish, significant gains were noted only for narrative story score. Kindergarten Spanish story scores predicted first-grade English narrative quality even when controlling for the effects of English vocabulary and English narrative productivity. First-grade Spanish narrative quality was best predicted by Spanish vocabulary.Implications-The need for early assessment and monitoring of expressive vocabulary and oral narrative skills, and the potential contributions of Spanish story organization skills to English narrative performance in bilingual children from low socioeconomic families, are highlighted. Keywordsnarrative; vocabulary; bilingual children; Spanish; cross-language associationsThe study of oral language skills is at the forefront of the current research agenda on improving literacy achievement in U.S. schools. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature, the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth identified English oral proficiency as a crucial area of concern for students who speak a language other than English at home (August & Shanahan, 2006). The panel found that when learning to read, languageminority children attain levels of performance that are similar to those of English monolinguals NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript in word-level skills (decoding, word identification, and spelling), but they lag considerably behind in text-level skills (reading comprehension and writing). Whereas English oral proficiency is not associated to word-level skills, it does predict English reading comprehension and writing, hence playing a critical role in explaining the disparity in literacy levels (August & Shanahan, 2006).Among the various English oral proficiency skills, vocabulary knowledge and narrative ability have been found to be important precursors to ...

The Home Literacy Environment and the English Narrative Development of Spanish–English Bilingual Children

“…Previous cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on the English narratives of Spanish-English bilingual children have demonstrated that both microstructure and macrostructure improve as children progress from preschool to the early school-age years (e.g., Muñoz, Gillam, Peña, & Gulley-Faehnle, 2003;Rojas & Iglesias, 2013;Squires et al, 2014;Uccelli & Páez, 2007). However, the factors that may support narrative development have not been widely investigated.…”

Early Language and Literacy Development Among Young English Language Learners: Preliminary Insights from a Longitudinal Study

“…136-137). This process of language loss and shift occurs rapidly once these children have experienced their first exposure to the broader English-speaking community and begin to attend school (deVries, 1999;Uccelli & Paez, 2007). In this window of time young ELL may find themselves in linguistic limbo (Glennen, 2002) just as they are about to make their initial steps into emergent and early literacy development in K-grade 2 and beyond.…”

“…One promising approach is to elicit spontaneous narrative from a prompt such as a wordless picture storybook. Profiling narrative output along such measures as total number of words (T), number of words (NDW), and type-token ratio (T divided by NDW) has been the most common approach (Reich & Reich, 1977;Watkins & Kelly, 1995;Uccelli & Paez, 2007). However, these measures have generally not been found sensitive indicators of English narrative productivity.…”

“…This perspective on learning to read may account for the underidentification of ELL at risk in the early stages of literacy development and the overidentification of ELL in the learning-disabled category, spiking at around grade 5 (Calgary Board of Education, 2006). Geva and Verhoeven (2000), Biemiller (2003Biemiller ( , 2004, , Vermeer (2006), and Uccelli and Paez (2007), on the other hand, stress the importance of vocabulary knowledge in a balanced early literacy approach for young ELL. They recognize that vocabulary development will be a long, gradual process and that the initial gap between ELL and their native-speaking counterparts may never completely close.…”

Beyond Chronicity: Evaluation and Temporality in Spanish-Speaking Children's Personal Narratives

“…This claim also applies to Latino bilingual children from the United States. Findings on monolingual Spanish speakers' narratives might prove relevant for bilingual children, particularly given research that P1: jsy Top Margin: 0.3764in Gutter Margin: 0.87828in CUUS321-08 cuus321/mccabe ISBN: 978 0 521 88375 7 May 21, 2008 21:26 Beyond Chronicity 203 suggests transfer of narrative structure skills across languages (Pearson, 2002;Uccelli & Páez, 2007). However, Latino children in the United States come from different countries, from families with various characteristics, and from different language-socialization patterns.…”