Oral narrative retelling among emergent bilinguals in a dual language immersion program

ABSTRACT

Oral narrative retelling is a complex linguistic and cognitive task that has been shown to map onto reading fluency and comprehension. Therefore, it is important to understand oral retelling skill, especially among emergent bilingual children – those who are learning two languages simultaneously. In this article, exploratory quantitative and qualitative findings from a study investigating the bilingual narrative retelling abilities of young heritage Spanish-speaking emergent bilingual children are reported. Kindergarten, first, and second grade children (N = 65) were assessed in each language separately using comparable wordless picture books, and their performance within and across languages was investigated. Two findings emerged: (1) children’s performance on retelling was significantly related across languages; but (2) individual children exhibited different patterns of bilingual strengths and challenges. These findings underscore the value of conducting academic oral assessments in both languages. In particular, the oral language proficiency of some children would be underestimated if their performance in only one language was considered. Implications for instruction and assessment are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral narrative retell
• emergent bilinguals
• language development
• dual language education
• primary grades

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Audrey Lucero is an assistant professor whose work broadly investigates the experiences of Spanish-speaking Latin@s with the U.S. public school system. Three specific strands of inquiry guide her current research agenda: 1) oral language and reading achievement among young Spanish-English emergent bilingual children; 2) dual language immersion education programs as venues for biliteracy development and community empowerment; and 3) the experiences of Latin@ undergraduate students at predominantly White state universities.

Notes

1 In ONR transcripts presented here, children's utterances have been segmented into C-units, but are otherwise presented exactly as the child told the story, including unconventional vocabulary and grammar. Maze behavior is indicated by parentheses, * indicates a missing word or part of word, and > indicates an incomplete utterance. Incomplete utterances were not considered in calculating MLUw. X indicates an unintelligible word.