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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. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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Narratives in Two Languages: Assessing Performance of Bilingual ChildrenVera Gutierrez-Clellen
Linguistics and Education 13(2): 175–197
Professor, Speech LanguageDirector, 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
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.