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Using story re-tell in bilingual assessment.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Narrative has been used in the assessment of children's language skills for some time but rarely with bilingual children (though see Guti6rrez-Clellen 2002). This paper examines narratives of a sample of German/English bilingual children in terms of standard measures and differences in the children's retellings of a story. Whereas on the standard measures the bilinguals seem similar to monolinguals, the retellings show differences between the English- and German-dominant informants. These differences highlight the significance of examining discrete skills when profiling the language competences of bilingual children.

Introduction

Narrative has been used to assess both the global skill of reconstructing a story as well as a range of different sub-skills of children's language. Regarding sub-skills, narratives are a good indicator of linguistic complexity, often requiring the use of subordinate clauses to specify the cause or purpose of a particular action alongside the description of the action itself. In addition, narratives can also give an indication of children's discourse skills, in particular the introduction of referents, topic maintenance, location of an action in time, use of connectives, etc (Hickman 2003). The global skill of understanding and reconstructing a story has been found to be linked closely to the development of literacy skills, both in terms of children's understanding of texts (Gutierrez-Clellen 2002), as well as children's writing skills (Shrubshall 1997).

Due to the different task demands within a specific context, narratives have been used as an assessment tool both in the classroom and in a clinical setting. Within the classroom, they enable teachers to assess children at different levels of language and to make a judgment about their ability to construct a story, as well as their pronunciation and vocabulary (Parke 2001). Within a clinical setting, narratives can reveal difficulties at different language levels and also highlight problems with story comprehension and discourse skills. However, such an assessment requires norms based on normally developing peers at the same mental or language age.

The subject group targeted in the present paper are children who come to the fore as an issue not in general developmental terms, as language-disordered children do, but in educational terms. Children who have acquired more than one language from birth are often seen to be at a higher risk for difficulties in academic performance at school, particularly where the language taught at school is the child's second language (L2). It is regrettable to put these two populations together, as it may seem to perpetuate the ancient prejudice against bilingualism as a kind of disorder, but the authors do so purely from a methodological perspective. Studies investigating narratives in bilingual children have found them to be less advanced than matched monolingual children on a variety of measures (Shrubshall 1997) and to employ different strategies from monolingual children when lexical difficulties arise (Parke 2001). Comparing narratives in both languages of Spanish-English bilinguals, Gutierrez-Clellen (2002) found differences in the recall and comprehension of a story, such that the children showed better performance in the language used in the classroom (L2) as opposed to their...

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