Narratives in Two Languages: Assessing Performance of Bilingual Children Vera Gutierrez-Clellen

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

2. Professor, Speech LanguageDirector, Bilingual Child Language Research Laboratory San Diego State University San Diego, California

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

4. 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

5. 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

6. Methods Teacher questionnaires Parent questionnaires Spontaneous narratives Story recall task Story comprehension task

7. Spontaneous Narratives

8. Story Recall Task

9. Story Comprehension Task

10. Results

11. Quantitative analysis

12. Story Recall zscores

13. Story Comprehension zscores

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

15. 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.”

16. Narrative Proficiency

17. 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.

18. 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.