Page 90 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

90 Chapter 5 compare we will now report on some findings which can be used as references for our study. Difference between narrative ability in L1 and L2 Most studies using the MAIN as an instrument investigated the difference between macrostructure in L1 and L2 stories. In some studies, a difference was found between the two languages of the participants. For example, Kapalková, Polišenská, Marková, and Fenton found that Slovak-English children’s (age 5 to 6) macrostructure scores were higher in their L1 compared to their L2, but not for the number of goals and attempts (Kapalková et al., 2016;). Others did not find a difference between L1 and L2 (For Hebrew-English children aged 5;6–6;6: Altman, Armon-Lotem, Fichman, & Walters, 2016; For Finnish- Swedish children aged 5;0–6;7: Kunnari, Välimaa, & Laukkanen-Nevala, 2016). Altman et al. (2016) found that there was no difference in macrostructure score between L1 and L2, furthermore, length of exposure to the new language showed no influence on macrostructure. The fact that most macrostructure components do not differ between the two languages of a participant confirms the claim of the authors of the MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2012) that a narrative task is less biased for multilingual pupils, which is reassuring for the present study. One study that did find differences in macrostructure was Gagarina (2016). Gagarina reported differences in Structural Complexity between the German and Russian stories of Russian-German bilinguals. Russian-German bilinguals told stories that were more complex in Russian compared to their German stories. Gagarina argued that since the children in Russian received explicit instruction about all aspects of Story Structure, they scored better in that language. For some reason the transfer of knowledge on macrostructure in Russian to German seemed to be delayed. Gagarina (2016) stressed the fact that narrative ability should be investigated through multiple macrostructure measures, because it seems that different components do not have an identical developmental trajectory. Furthermore, Gagarina used story length as a microstructural measure, but she concluded that a more in-depth investigation of microstructural elements would be appropriate. Development of narratives Whereas the studies in the previous section focused on differences between stories in L1 and L2, other studies using the MAIN focused on the development of different narrative ability components with a cross-sectional design. For example, Bohnacker (2016) compared stories from Swedish-English 5-year-old bilinguals with stories from 6- to 7-year olds, with a minimum of two years of exposure to the L2. The younger group mainly produced attempts, and internal state terms were used rarely. The older participants did not perform on ceiling level either: goals were still not mastered, but the macrostructure did differ between these age groups, the older children told more complex stories. Gagarina