Narrative abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with and without language impairment: implications for clinical practice

Abstract

This study confirms the hypothesis that measures of narrative macro-structure are not biased against children who have less experience with a particular language, like bilinguals. In addition, it indicates that using narratives to assess children's language abilities can support the identification of LI in both a monolingual and a bilingual context.

Should We Use Sentence- or Text-Level Tasks to Measure Oral Language Proficiency in Year-One Students following Whole-Class Intervention?

“…However, despite these difficulties, they were able to retell a short, well-sequenced, and accurate story. We therefore reiterate our opinion that a text-level task such as the PONA is a more ecologically valid way of appraising oral language performance in young school-age students [43]. …”

“…Informal measures reduce the bias of standardised norm-referenced assessments that over-identify students from culturally diverse or low socioeconomic backgrounds [40, 41]. For example, there is a growing body of evidence supporting the use of oral narrative tasks to appraise student language abilities in both monolingual and bilingual students [42, 43]. The findings from these studies indicate student performance on oral narrative tasks was similar for both groups of students, suggesting bilingual students were not disadvantaged by this measure [42, 43].…”

The Persistence and Functional Impact of English Language Difficulties Experienced by Children Learning English as an Additional Language and Monolingual Peers

“…To be specific, TD bilingual children do not differ from monolingual peers in narrative macrostructure, which concerns the inclusion of key story elements within the narrative (Boerma et al, 2016;Hipfner-Boucher et al, 2014;Rezzonico et al, 2015;Rodina, 2016). Moreover, monolingual and bilingual children with language impairment show comparably impaired narrative macrostructure (Boerma et al, 2016;Cleave et al, 2010;Rezzonico et al, 2015). Other studies have found that bilingual children with language impairment show poorer narrative macrostructure than TD bilingual peers (Paradis et al, 2013;Squires et al, 2014), though there are notable exceptions (Iluz-Cohen & Walters, 2012;Tsimpli et al, 2016).…”

“…Moreover, measures of expressive vocabulary and receptive grammar also did not discriminate between these groups at age 6 years. Furthermore, Boerma, Leseman, Timmermeister, Wijnen, and Blom (2016) and Thordardottir and Brandeker (2013) found that although TD bilingual children outperformed bilingual peers with language impairment on a measure of receptive vocabulary, they performed comparably to monolingual children with language impairment.…”

“…Narrative production tasks, which require children to generate a story or retell a previously presented story using a series of pictures, are generally considered a less biased measure of language in bilingual children (Boerma et al, 2016;Cleave, Girolametto, Chen, & Johnson, 2010). To be specific, TD bilingual children do not differ from monolingual peers in narrative macrostructure, which concerns the inclusion of key story elements within the narrative (Boerma et al, 2016;Hipfner-Boucher et al, 2014;Rezzonico et al, 2015;Rodina, 2016). Moreover, monolingual and bilingual children with language impairment show comparably impaired narrative macrostructure (Boerma et al, 2016;Cleave et al, 2010;Rezzonico et al, 2015).…”