Panel Title

SLA: Panel

Studies in Narrative Competence: Bilingual Children Tell the Story in Two Languages

Paper Title

"Frog, Where Are You?": Storytelling Performance of Bilingual Children

Author's Name, E-mail Address and Institution

Sanae Fukuda, fukudasensei@hotmail.com, Lowell High School

Abstract

Bilingual children, as they grow, are assumed to be facing much more challenging tasks than monolingual children. For instance, bilingual children demonstrate vocabulary scores in each language that are below normal, particularly during the preschool years. This may be a result of the fact that bilinguals are learning almost twice as many words in the same time frame as a monolingual. Storytelling offers an appropriate lens through which to study not only monolingual but also bilingual children's language skills development. A narrative is typically considered to be a series of events related in chronological order. Studies of narratives have shown the importance of properties of their structure in explaining universal patterns of language in use among native and nonnative speakers alike. Telling a story involves factors that reflect different cultural emphases. For example, people from different cultural backgrounds encode their own perspectives and emotions in their narratives in different ways. In this research, using the Frog, Where Are You? picture book (Mayer, 1969), forty bilingual children, ages six to twelve, were asked to narrate the story in two languages, English and Japanese. The results generally suggest that those children who possessed competent literacy skills in Japanese possessed equivalent literacy skills in English. The study, however, also revealed that the bilingual children used more words when telling narratives in English than in Japanese. The study further indicated that the bilingual children tended to provide more referential details in English whereas, in Japanese, the same narrators tended to emphasize evaluative descriptions. Recognizing the close relationship between culture and language, the study implies that bilinguals access different cultural systems in their minds when telling the same story in different languages.
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