The development of narrative competence in the L1 and L2 of Spanish-English bilingual children

Abstract

The present paper examines the development of narrative competence in the two languages of three Spanish-English bilingual children with different proficiency levels in each language. The children's narratives, elicited at two different times over a six-month span, are examined in terms of the young narrator's ability to organize the story around an overall theme line, his/her capacity to evaluate the narrative and reach the audience, and his /her appropriate use of those linguistic devices—such as temporal perspective and cohesion—that relate utterances to one another allowing for the creation of a narrative text. The results indicate that impoverished linguistic resources might be detrimental for narrative competence. Without an array of linguistic devices at their disposal, the children in this study fail to produce coherent and cohesive narratives in their L2. Yet, their L1 narrative discourse suggests that the children possess the cognitive skills underlying the ability to construct thematically oriented and linguistically cohesive accounts. Evaluation, on the other hand, appears to be proficiency-independent: despite their limited L2 competence, the children are capable, from early on, of evaluating both their Spanish and English narratives, and they do so by means of a preferred evaluative strategy or by a combination of different expressive devices.