Panel Title

SLA: Panel

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

Author's Name, E-mail Address and Institution

Masahiko Minami, mminami@sfsu.edu, San Francisco State University

Abstract

The most important linguistic development in the early school years is children's growing ability to create extended narratives. Children move from the local level of organizing words within a sentence to a global level, where they are expected to organize sentences into a coherent, hierarchical discourse. While each sentence individually contributes information to the whole, it also serves to direct the flow of information smoothly and cohesively across sentences. This development of this organizational process is not limited to monolingual children; it also applies to children who are learning more than one language either simultaneously or successively. The proposed panel will present a technique for evaluation of language and literacy development of bilingual children (children of Japanese heritage). For this purpose, using a wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969), we asked a group of children to create a story in both English and Japanese. We examined bilingual children's narratives because it provided us with an opportunity to isolate which elements appear to develop within the context of learning a specific language, and which are tied to more general growth across languages. This panel will focus on various features of bilingual children's narrative development. From a discourse perspective, we will examine whether, as children grow, their stories in both languages provide increasingly more elements of the adult genre — especially, more setting of the scene, more problem-resolution sequences, and more complex and frequent narrator's comments on the action. Likewise, in terms of the development of discourse markers, we will examine whether, as they grow, bilingual children speaking in both languages show increasingly coherent time referencing, smoother event sequencing, more adequate/explicit anaphoric reference and, conversely, less ambiguous anaphoric reference. Overall, we will demonstrate how, through the task of narrating simple stories like the "Frog Story," bilingual children's cognitive developments are expanding/developing during the school years.

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