Page 46 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff
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46 Chapter 2 For example a German-Dutch bilingual child might be able to tell a long story in German with many different words, but on the other hand will tell the same story in Dutch much shorter and with less variation in the words since this is the language the child is just starting to learn. Narrative macrostructure refers to the global organization of a story beyond the word, sentence, or utterance level (Blom & Boerma, 2016) and is therefore related to discourse competence. Macrostructure needs not to be newly acquired because this global organization of stories seems to be universal and once acquired in one language can be transferred to another language. Macrostructural aspects can be analyzed using so called a “story grammar,” which includes components such as the setting and a logical event structure (e.g., initiating event, internal response, plan, action, consequence, and reaction; Stein & Glenn, 1979). If that German-Dutch bilingual child has learned that a story contains a setting a goal and a result in German, he or she will try to include these parts of the story also in Dutch, although they might not be able to elaborate on the matter in both languages. Macrostructural performance is therefore seen as less language dependent than microstructure performance, because it is suggested that macrostructure is partly dependent on cognitive schemas available for all the languages of a speaker (Iluz-Cohen & Walters, 2012; Pearson, 2002). Thus, using narratives as an assessment provides the opportunity to distinguish between knowledge that seems to develop within the context of learning a new language, and knowledge about how to tell a story that is seen as more universal (Cummins, 1984). An advantage of using narrative tasks, according to different researchers (e.g. Cleave, Girolametto, Chen, & Johnson, 2010; Boerma, Leseman, Timmermeister, Wijnen, & Blom, 2016; Paradis et al., 2011) is that they are less biased for multilingual participants because narratives do not only tap into language specific knowledge; narratives also require general skills like cognitive, social, and pragmatic skills (Liles, 1993). The standardized part of the narratives – the story grammar or macrostructure – is expected to be equally well developed for monolingual pupils and bilingual pupils, and thus bilinguals are expected to show age appropriate behavior. The microstructure however is expected to really show second language development and on this part we will see differences in proficiency in the second language. Pearson (2002) stresses the usefulness of narratives as a linguistic measure because of the presence of both linguistic and discourse competence in one instrument: “By separating the scoring of the stories into independent components and even subcomponents, we can examine the separate contribution of each element to more global measures of the children’s growth” (Pearson, 2002, p. 137). Furthermore, narratives are especially useful for examining the language skills of bilinguals, since there seems to be greater dissociations between their component language skills (Pearson, Oller, Umbel, & Fernández, 1996). 


































































































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