How do narrative and language skills relate to each other?

Abstract

Past studies on narratives have identified two main dimensions of narrative production: the story-related narrative quality, which relates to the narrative structure and evaluations, and the language-related quality, which relates to the appropriate use of linguistic devices that contribute to the overall discourse cohesion. Although studies on the language development of monolinguals and bilinguals have demonstrated the developmental nature of the two different narrative dimensions, little attention has been paid to the potential relationship between them. Thus, this study aimed to identify the interrelationship between the two main narrative quality skills and explored the role of cross-language facilitations for performance on each of these narrative dimensions. Oral Frog Story narratives produced by 70 six-year-old Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners were analyzed. The findings indicated that the two narrative sub-dimensions play facilitative roles for each other within English (L2), and that there are cross-language contributions for only the linguistic quality of narratives. The findings are discussed in relation to the bilingual children’s language proficiency and the degree of differences in narrative conventions across the two languages.