Linköping Studies in Arts and Science
No. 156

Bilingual and Monolingual Children's Narration: Discourse Strategies and
Narrative Styles

Ingrid Andersson

Akademisk avhandling

som för avläggande av filosofie doktorsexamen vid Linköpings Universitet kommer att offentligt försvaras i sal Elysion, Hus T, Universitetsområdet i Valla, onsdagen den 4juni 1997, kl 13.15. Avhandlingen kommer att försvaras på engelska.

ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates twenty bilingual and twenty monolingual 6-year-old preschool children's discourse strategies and narrative styles. It is theoretically based on an interdiciplinary framework combining theories of narration with discourse theories.

Methodologically, the study draws on micro-analyses of children's spontaneous sharing time narrations, on the one hand, and elicited retellings of a fable, on the other. A new method was developed for analysing Labovian story points from a collaborative perspective: differentiating between child contributions, teacher contributions, and joint contributions.

Moreover, all children were interviewed about their literary repertoires and about narrative practices at home. It was found that children's vocabulary was closely linked to their literary repertoires and cultural habits.

By calculating the repair:error ratio, the present study shows that there is a linear development in children's repair work, instead of an inverted U-curve as previously suggested. Language repairs were rare in both groups. The children primarily focused on meaning, not on linguisitc form. However, there were more language errors in the bilingual group. Moreover, the bilingual group had a more restricted vocabulary. Yet, the findings reveal that narrative coherence was comparable in the monolingual and bilingual groups.

In an analysis of participation during sharing time sessions, it was found that peer comments and child initiatives were more frequent in the monolingual group, and in specific preschool settings.

Collaboration was investigated both in terms of teacher support, co-narration, and in terms of indirect ways of collaborating, like the employment of communication strategies and self-repairs. It was found that bilingual children received more collaborative support and employed more communication strategies than their monolingual peers.

Key words: bilingual children, narration, co-narration, narrative style, communication strategies, repairs, cultural dispositions, participation.

Language: English

Institute of Tema Research, Department of Child Studies, Linköping University, S-58183 Linköping, Sweden, Linköping 1997. ISBN 91-7871-948-8, ISSN 0282-9800