Narrative development in dual language learning Latino preschoolers

Latino dual language learning (DLL) children are among the fastest growing populations in the U.S., and educators need a greater understanding of the abilities they bring to preschool in order to foster school readiness. Because stories are an integral part of the classroom, narrative competence is predictive of later academic success. However, there is a lack of research on the development of narrative skill in DLL children, particularly with a longitudinal approach that assesses growth across languages and with a large group of children. Thus, the three papers that make up this dissertation used a mixed methods approach to explore the growth of narrative competence over the school year, while varying contextual factors including narrative task and language. We interviewed 125 DLL Latino Head Start preschoolers in the fall, winter, and spring. At each time point, children were asked to produce personal experience, picture series, and book reading narratives both in English and in Spanish. Narratives were coded in the language spoken for narrative length, coherence, and temporality. Despite standardized elicitation, children showed extensive heterogeneity in their ability to produce narrative across time, task, and language. Narrative temporality indices remained static over the school year, but linear growth was observed in both narrative length and coherence, with children's performance on these measures consistent across languages, but not across tasks. Children were consistently able to maintain the target narrative language; the language mixing that was observed reflected pragmatic needs rather than stylistic choice. Overall, there was a trend toward increasing levels of English both within and across narratives, which reflects the prevailing language ideologies of the surrounding community. Given the sensitivity of children's performance to contextual variations, early intervention exposing children to an array of narratives tasks in both languages is essential. A one-size-fits-all approach is also not recommended for narrative assessment. Although the book readings elicited the longest and most complex stories across languages, providing children with more than one opportunity to tell a story, using at least two tasks, and encouraging DLL children to narrate in both languages will provide a better estimate of children's actual narrative abilities.