Page 47 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

Theoretical perspectives 47 2.6.3 Narrative ability development of second language learners The narrative development of bilinguals has been the subject of many studies. Squires, Lugo-Neris, Peña, Bedore, Bohman and Gillam (2014) report on a study on bilingual children with a retell task8 with two wordless picture books by Mayer Frog On His Own (Mayer, 1973) or One Frog Too Many (Mayer, 1975). They found that bilingual children follow the general pattern for narrative development that Berman (1988, 2001) describes for monolingual children: bilingual children, like monolingual children show an increase of their use of macrostructural elements as they grow older. Many studies have shown narrative skills, once acquired in one language is transferred to another language (Pearson, 2002; Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2002; Squires et al., 2014; Iluz-Cohen & Walters, 2012; Fiestas & Peña, 2004) – but this only concerns macrostructure. Microstructure seems to be more reliant on language ability, and thus more dependent on the level of proficiency in the language being tested. The expectation is that the amount of exposure to the L2 might influence the microstructure since this measure is considered dependent upon L2 language proficiency. The macrostructure of a narrative, on the other hand, is expected to be similar in both languages of a child regardless of the amount of exposure to L2 since there is assumed to be a transfer of the macrostructure from one language to the other (Iluz-Cohen & Walters, 2012; Pearson, 2002). That being said, a child does require a minimum level of specific vocabulary knowledge in L2 in order to be able to narrate about macrostructure: “Narrative structure \[...\] belongs to a general conceptual level which is available even in the processing of the L2 once a certain linguistic threshold has been passed” (Viberg, 2001, p. 124). Before that linguistic threshold has been met the focus of the narrator is on concrete events (Viberg, 2001). We know of only one Dutch study specifically involving the narrative ability of newly arrived migrant pupils (Jelsma, 2015; Le Pichon & Baauw, 2015). The participants of this study were between five and ten years old and they were asked to tell a story elicited by a text free picture story about a boy going to the doctor for a shot. All participants told the story twice with four to four-and-a-half months in between. The focus of this study was on two aspects of microstructure (namely, narrative complex language and lexical diversity) and one part of macrostructure (namely, the use of Internal State Term, words about the mental states of the story characters). The whole group of participants had a positive development on the use of complex language and the use of IST, but not on lexical diversity (measured by calculating the TTR) there seemed to be no difference between the two sessions on that aspect of narrative ability. We can compare the data of our participants with two of the measure of Jelsema (2015): the data on lexical diversity and on the use of IST. As will be explained in Chapter 5, we however used a different lexical diversity 8 In a retell task the participants listens to a story by the researcher and then have to retell the story.