The development of narrative competence in the L1 and L2 of Spanish-English bilingual children

Abstract

The present paper examines the development of narrative competence in the two languages of three Spanish-English bilingual children with different proficiency levels in each language. The children's narratives, elicited at two different times over a six-month span, are examined in terms of the young narrator's ability to organize the story around an overall theme line, his/her capacity to evaluate the narrative and reach the audience, and his /her appropriate use of those linguistic devices—such as temporal perspective and cohesion—that relate utterances to one another allowing for the creation of a narrative text. The results indicate that impoverished linguistic resources might be detrimental for narrative competence. Without an array of linguistic devices at their disposal, the children in this study fail to produce coherent and cohesive narratives in their L2. Yet, their L1 narrative discourse suggests that the children possess the cognitive skills underlying the ability to construct thematically oriented and linguistically cohesive accounts. Evaluation, on the other hand, appears to be proficiency-independent: despite their limited L2 competence, the children are capable, from early on, of evaluating both their Spanish and English narratives, and they do so by means of a preferred evaluative strategy or by a combination of different expressive devices.

The development of coherence and cohesion in monolingual and sequential bilingual children’s narratives

“…Psychological relations between internal reactions and their precipitating events seemed more resistant to the effects of language background or age, as corroborated by their quite pervasive expression in L1 and L2 at both ages. Together, these findings are not in line with previous studies on the development of evaluation in picture-based narratives (as a partially similar category to psychological reactions, see footnote 4), where the overall proportion of evaluative devices was reported to be scarce at these developmental stages (Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991;Bavin, 2009;Nakamura, 2009;Pearson, 2001). We believe that perceptual saliency represented in facial expressions and body gestures throughout the pictures triggered the consistent expression of psychological causation, where narrators mostly referred to the emotional reactions of the protagonists.…”

“…Previous studies of story comprehension have found that enablement is a weaker relation as compared to others (Trabasso et al, 1989;Tapiero, van den Broek, & Quintana, 2002), a claim that is worth examining in the development of narrative production. From these findings, one may suggest a gradual progression from locally to more globally driven expression of causal relations in L1 and L2, although some types of causality relations may be predominantly data-driven and thus more reliant on accessible language forms (Karmiloff-Smith, 1985;Nakamura, 2009).…”

“…Evaluative content has been defined as that part of the narrative that suspends the temporal line of the events and focuses on emphasizing the meaning of the narrative, by means of particular semantic and structural strategies. Developmental studies on the expression of evaluation in narratives have focused on specific categories such as frames of mind (emotion, cognitive and affective terms), character speech, causal connectors, or intensifiers (Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991;Nakamura, 2009;Peterson & McCabe, 1983).…”

Basque L2 development in immersion school settings

“…At age 5, children produce more complete stories in L1 than in L2 according to Montanari (2004). And finally, at ages 8 and 9, most children reproduce the complete narrative structure in their L1, according to data presented by Berman andSlobin (1994) andDe Weck (1991).…”

Die Rolle verschiedener methodischer Zugänge bei der Einschätzung sprachlicher Kompetenzen von Grundschulkindern mit Deutsch als L2

“…Einschränkend ist allerdings zu sagen, dass unsere Ergebnisse zum selbstgesteuerten Lesen nicht mit den gleichen Kindern gewonnen wurden wie die in den Studien von Kupersmitt/Yifat/Blum-Kulka (2014) und Montanari (2004). Die Studien unterscheiden sich im Alter der Kinder, in den beteiligten Sprachen und in der Modalität (schriftlich vs. mündlich).…”