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Margareta Almgren, Leire Beloki, and Ibon Manterola
146-156 (complete pdf)
The aim of this paper is to compare the development of narrative skills in Spanish by two groups of five-year-old children who are brought up in bilingual contexts where Spanish and Basque are their L1 or L2 respectively. The analysis of children's oral narratives includes narrative autonomy, story structure and introduction of characters. Children's narratives were collected in a semi-experimental classroom setting, where children were videotaped while listening to and re-telling a story in Spanish based on a wordless picture-book. On the whole, L1 speakers show a greater autonomy when accomplishing the narrative task and also produce more complete stories than L2 speakers. However, some L2 speakers also show quite developed narrative skills in Spanish. Taking into account that all L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish attend school in Basque, the authors conclude that positive transfer might occur not only from L1 to L2, but also from L2 to L1 when it comes to specific skills such as story-telling (Cummins 1991, Idiazabal & Larringan 1997).
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 10th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium
edited by Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Elena Valenzuela
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-427-0 library binding
v+311 pages
publication date: 2008
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA