Narratives in Two Languages: Assessing Performance of Bilingual Children

Abstract Studies with monolingual children have demonstrated the significance of children’s narrative development for the acquisition of literacy skills. However, little is known about the narrative skills of Spanish-speaking children who are in the process of becoming bilingual. These children may exhibit various levels of competence in the first (L1) and second language (L2). For some of these children, their English narrative skills may not be sufficient to facilitate their literacy development. This study examined the narrative performance of 33 typically developing bilingual children in both (Spanish) L1 and English (L2), using story recall and story comprehension tasks. Most children exhibited greater narrative recall and story comprehension in English, and some children showed significantly poorer performance on the narrative recall than on a spontaneous narrative production task for one of the languages. The data underscored the notion of bilingualism as a continuum of proficiencies. Narrative assessment tasks in L1 and L2, which appear to be comparable, may not pose similar processing demands on a bilingual speaker.