Narrative skills in Monolingual and Bilingual Children: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Narratives are a self-initiated, self-controlled form of discourse. As such, narratives are an important part of the language assessment of older school-age children and adolescents because they provide an uninterrupted sample of language that the child or adolescent modifies to capture and hold the listeners interest (Crais & Chapman 1987; Culatta, Page & Ellis 1983; Hewitt & Duchan. 1995; Johnson, 1982b; Liles, 1987, Scott 1988b). The aim of the present investigation was to study and explore the narrative skills in monolingual Malayalam speaking and bilingual Malayalam-English speaking children iii different task environments. 60 monolingual and 60 bilingual children were selected for the purpose of the study. The ASLPR rating scale was used for the purpose of selecting with the help of the teachers. Narratives were collected from both the groups across different tasks i.e. book task and picture task. The data collected was transcribed followed 'by reliability measures. The data was analyzed for productivity measures and grammaticality measures. The data was then subjected to statistical analysis. The results indicated significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in their narrative production. Bilinguals performed better in their narration than monolinguals by producing more cohesive and grammatically complex utterances and the information content in the narration of bilingual children was better when compared to monolinguals which again supports the hypothesis that bilingualism aids better cognitive linguistic and metalinguistics abilities in these children. Clinical implications have been discussed.