An Examination of Story Narration by Monolingual and Bilingual Turkish Children

Abstract

In the present case study, we aimed to explore whether there were any differences between monolingual Turkish and Turkish-Italian bilingual children in terms of their use of language structures in Turkish while narrating a story from a picture book titled “Frog, where are you?” by Mayer (1969). Four monolingual Turkish and three Turkish-Italian bilingual children narrated the story. The data from the recordings indicated some differences in terms of preference for certain language features like tense differences in their story narration. While younger monolinguals reported the events in the story with past tense markers like –mIş and –Iyor, bilingual children displayed a marked tendency for the past tense –mIş marker. The older children in both groups chose to use the –Iyor marker used by monolingual teenagers and adults. We argued that such differences in preferences might indicate an effect of Italian, or the interlanguage varieties might be responsible for the discrepancies. Explanations as to why these differences might have occurred and some practical suggestions for educators are provided in the study.