Narrative & Literacy Development & Disorder in Spanish-English Bilinguals

What is Different in a Bilingual?

• • Overall narrative structure for monolinguals and bilinguals is the same.

  • In their narrative samples, bilingual children attending an English language school may have a greater diversity of words in English than in Spanish.

  • Elliptical referent use should reflect the child’s proficiency with Spanish grammar. Spanish subjects can be omitted if a referent is introduced in the previous statement.

  • Any structures common to both languages will be overrepresented in the language less commonly used. 

    1. Narratives in English may not contain compulsory subjects. 

    2. Spanish speakers are more likely to use relative clauses across languages than English-only speakers.

  •  Skills necessary for all children learning to read: 

    1. Inside-out component skills: emergent literacy, alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness.

    2. Outside-in component skills: vocabulary, reading comprehension, morphological knowledge.

  • Spanish-speaking emerging bilinguals tend to have literacy levels below their monolingual peers.

  • Bilingual narratives will often include a mix of characteristics from both languages (cross-linguistic effects), including the following: 

    1. The use of more relative clauses in Spanish than in English.

    2. Bilinguals may be confused about when to use pronouns in Spanish vs. English. Spanish speakers often have inferred subjects (ellipsis); English speakers always use one.

    3. Spanish has more aspect differences (6 in Spanish compared to 4 in English) used to mark temporality, so Spanish narratives will have more information about the timing and/or overlap of events.

    4. English uses more words to describe motion and directionality because that information is more included in Spanish verbs.

    5. Some sentences in Spanish have more flexibility concerning word order, whereas English has a fixed word order that does not reverse to mark shifts in perspective or emphasize information.

    6. Spanish has a smaller phoneme inventory.

• *If a child has learned to read in Spanish, they might expect words to be pronounced phonetically in English.

  • Not all sounds in English are present in Spanish; therefore, a Spanish-speaking child may not know a sound and would consequently have problems decoding words for this reason.

Disordered Language: Characteristics of Narratives and Literacy

• Likely to omit specific links between events and no clausal relationships.

• Little referential cohesion, vague noun phrases, overuse of pronouns.

• Greater use of mazes, revisions, and repetitions due to insufficient word retrieval.

• Insufficient background information: causal, referential, and temporal relationships.

• May have difficulty comprehending narratives.

• Limitations in any area of language will affect literacy development.

• Little detail about setting tends to prefer motion tense (preterit) over setting tense (imperfect).

• Likely to omit specific links between events, they might not show evident relationships that allow the audience to interpret the character’s actions or understand the main points.

Assessment

• Remember that children from bilingual backgrounds come from diverse experiences with literacy and storytelling and may not have had exposure to these kinds of tasks.

• Use a variety of elicitation tasks and stimuli, compare narratives from multiple contexts.

• Dynamic assessment.

Use scaffolding in each language to determine the child’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) for each language.

• Because bilinguals’ language skills may be dispersed across two languages, assessment should include a variety of context, communication partners, and stimuli across both languages.

• When assessing, make sure to look at temporal coherence, cause and effect relationships, introduction and reintroduction characters, and location or location changes.

• Use the test-teach-retest model: pick specific skills to work on, have the child retell a new narrative or story, and measure the changes in the taught aspects. Use those to make conclusions.

• Determine language dominance, but sample both.

• Breakdowns are possible in any of the inside-out and outside-in component skills. Assess all.

• Spanish-speaking emerging bilinguals tend to have literacy levels below their monolingual peers. Vital to assess exposure to text in both languages.

Intervention

• Narrative and lexical areas are essential targets (an explicit reference to characters).

• Mediation of some narrative skills will transfer chronology, listener knowledge, background info, referencing and reintroducing characters, descriptive language.

  1. Children may not be able to transfer specific targets in vocabulary from one language to the other.

  2. A bilingual treatment approach will promote faster learning and transfer.

• Aspects not expected to transfer across languages:

  1. Ellipsis and relative clauses, which should be taught in Spanish, 

  2. Specific vocabulary skills, which need to be taught in each language.

• Language games, songs, and poems that build on phonological concepts should be taught in both languages.

• For emergent literacy, instruction should be meaning-based and taught in a natural context with repeated exposure.

• A bilingual approach for narrative probably promotes faster learning than a monolingual approach to treatment.

Other Languages

• Important to reference the considerations above (language dominance, narrative exposure).

• Important to take into account how the syntactic structure of any language will inform narrative structure.

• Basic story elements (characters, conflict, resolutions) are similar across cultures, but story structure may differ.

• Inside-out component skills:

  1. Emergent literacy, alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness.

• Outside-in component skills:

  1. Vocabulary, reading comprehension, morphological knowledge.

• Focusing on narratives is a good strategy for any language when assessing PLI because it covers so many different aspects of language development.

• Get familiar with the language in question and what narrative structures are acceptable in that language because those structures might have cross-linguistic effects that might appear disordered.

• Always use dynamic assessment measures.