Why Storytelling Can Benefit Bilingual Children
Narrative tasks – including telling and retelling stories – are valuable tools for accurately and effectively assessing and intervening with bilingual children with typical and atypical development.
“Narrative imagining — story — is the fundamental instrument of thought…. It is our chief means of looking into the future, or predicting, of planning, and of explaining.”
– Mark Turner, Cognitive Scientist
“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.”
– Frank Smith, Psycholinguist
Bilingual children are exposed to rich linguistic and cultural variety in their daily lives, and have other cognitive and linguistic advantages, such as enhanced executive function skills and theory of mind, along with the ability to function in two languages. Yet, these children may also face challenges, particularly in the early years of schooling when they are still in the process of acquiring both of their languages. Because their language experience is distributed across two languages, they may have linguistic gaps and disparities in various areas of language proficiency, which can impact their academic performance and pose challenges for assessment and treatment. Parents, teachers, and clinicians interacting with this population may have difficulty distinguishing between typical and atypical bilingual development, resulting in over- or underdiagnosis of language and learning disorders. (“Mary is behind in X area of language – she must have a language impairment!” / “Thomas is behind in X area of language – but it’s because he’s bilingual – he’ll catch up.”) Complicating things further, many of the existing assessment and treatment tools have been normed on monolingual populations and so may not deliver the desired outcomes when used with bilingual populations. To achieve optimal results in evaluation and treatment, children should ideally be evaluated and treated in both languages. Given that this is usually not feasible, the question is which methods are most suitable for this population.
One tool that addresses many of the challenges discussed above is narrative assessment and intervention. My research, as well as that of many others, has shown that narrative tasks – including telling and retelling stories – are valuable tools for accurately assessing and intervening with bilingual children with both typical and atypical development. Here is why.
1. Narratives Provide a Wealth of Information.
Narratives supply a rich source of information about children’s linguistic competence at two levels: macrostructure (narrative structure – including the elements of a story) and microstructure (word and sentence level language). Macrostructure is a cognitive-academic skill that reflects a child’s ability to tell a coherent story, and it includes skills such as planning sequences of events and making inferences about characters’ thoughts and motivations. It is significant because it guides the later production and comprehension of oral and written narrative texts, a genre commonly used in educational settings. Microstructure includes the vocabulary and grammatical forms produced in the story. Thus, with one task it is possible to gain information about a wide range of language abilities, all produced in the naturalistic context of a story.
2. Narratives Index Oral Performance and Development.
Since narrative skills develop over time, they are a good index of a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. In fact, research has shown that age is more strongly correlated with a variety of linguistic measures for narratives than it is for conversation(!), leading scholars to suggest that for children aged 3-13, narratives yield “the best reflection of developmental change in general language skills through…development” (Leadholm & Miller, 1994, p.38). Other assessment instruments have their uses, but narratives provide an exceptional picture of a child’s ability to speak in a more natural setting. The language produced in narrative tasks is more ecologically valid than the language produced in traditional assessment tools, which usually narrowly target specific structures or vocabulary items. At the same time, narratives require more clear and explicit language than conversation, including relatively advanced linguistic skills, which are especially challenging to children with language impairments, making them a useful tool for distinguishing between children with and without typical language development. Narratives afford an opportunity for children to speak freely in a semi-structured setting, which allows practitioners to target specific types of language.
3. Narrative Tasks Are Less Biased.
Storytelling is a common practice in many cultures, which means that narrative tasks may be less culturally biased than standardized instruments. A common means for sharing information and experiences, narratives offer a familiar structure for eliciting language from children who may lack confidence in the language of assessment. Confirming this notion, research has shown that narrative structure is similar across many languages and cultures. In contrast, traditional tests have several issues for bilingual children. First, they are normed on monolingual children, and bilingual children may not perform like monolinguals, depending on the area of language being tested and their language experience. Therefore, these assessments may not capture the full scope of a bilingual child’s competence (which can only be measured comprehensively by testing in both languages). Furthermore, the task demands may be foreign to children from some cultures, amplifying the difficulty the child experiences. Using a familiar child-friendly narrative task can enhance children’s ability to demonstrate their linguistic knowledge in a nonthreatening environment, which brings us to the next advantage….
4. Narratives Can Aid in Detection of Language Impairment.
That narratives are less culturally biased is especially important when assessing children for language impairment. Research has revealed that bilingual children often perform better in vocabulary and grammar on narrative tasks than on traditional standardized assessments, as they allow children the freedom to express their linguistic knowledge (i.e., to show what they DO know, rather than what they DON’T). This means that narratives may yield fewer misdiagnoses than standardized measures for this population. Indeed, studies have revealed that narrative tasks are a clinically sensitive measure of language abilities for bilingual children. Clinicians can use narrative instruments to help identify language impairment in bilingual children (as well as monolingual children) and/or identify areas where a struggling bilingual child with typical language may need more support.
5. Narrative Skills Transfer Across Languages.
Macrostructure (narrative structure) is similar across many languages and relies on general cognitive processes that are relatively independent of linguistic development. Therefore, it provides a familiar framework for children to follow as they learn to comprehend and produce stories in a new language, scaffolding their developing language skills. Many studies have found that macrostructure skills are similar in the languages of bilingual children, implying that these skills transfer across languages. (A few studies have found differences in macrostructure across languages, usually observed in bilingual children who are significantly stronger in one of their languages.) In contrast, microstructure is more language-specific, and hence more variable across the languages of bilinguals. Research has shown that when parents read books to their children in their home language, their story structure in the societal language improves. Accordingly, children acquiring a new language can use their macrostructure skills from one language to enhance their storytelling in the other language.
6. Narratives Are Related to Academic Achievement.
Because the oral genre of narratives shares many features of written texts, it may be used to assess children’s projected academic competence at early ages. Research has shown that narratives are reliable predictors of literacy skills and reading comprehension in later school years; preschool and school-age children who struggle with comprehending and producing narratives are more likely to have later difficulties with assignments involving reading, writing, and spoken language. In addition, narrative production is considered a valuable skill for school-age children, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Common Core State Standards for students in the U.S.
In conclusion…
I’d like to end with two final comments about using narratives with bilingual populations. First, when using narrative instruments with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, adjustments may be necessary to ensure cultural appropriateness. For example, one aspect of narrative skill often assessed is character introduction and development, including naming the characters in a story. In my own research I have observed that when children are more familiar with the name of the characters in the story (in a story retelling task), they are more likely to use the names in their stories, which could enhance their scores. This suggests that choosing culturally familiar names for story characters is important. Similarly, narratives reflecting familiar childhood experiences must be chosen to activate story schemas and elicit richer language. I once participated in a story creation workshop with a diverse group of university students, and one of the students wrote a “typical childhood” story about harvesting olives, which was a completely unfamiliar experience for my family, for example, but was a typical childhood experience for children from her village. My (bilingual) children, and many others, would undoubtedly have had difficulty talking about that topic.
Second, the level of the task must be appropriate for the developmental stage of the child. For example, my research has shown that five- to six-year-old bilingual children perform significantly better in narrative structure on narrative tasks that are less complex (one episode vs. three episodes long). It is likely that older children with more established storytelling skills may perform equally well on both tasks, and they may need a more complex task to fully exhibit their skill, although further research is necessary to confirm this.
To sum up, used in conjunction with standardized assessments, narratives can be a valuable tool for assessment and therapy for bilingual and multilingual children. They can track a child’s language development in an unbiased manner, inform intervention strategies, and help identify language impairments. Narratives can also help improve skills in both languages and thus boost academic achievement. As Albert Einstein said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
I invite you to share your comments about your experience with narrative assessment and intervention in the comments below. Let’s learn from each other!
About the author
Minna Lipner is a senior lecturer in the English as a Foreign Language department at Bar-Ilan University and a post-doc researcher of child language at University College London. Her areas of expertise include second language acquisition, narratives in bilingual children with typical and atypical development, and bilingual narrative intervention. She holds an MA degree in TESOL and a PhD in English Linguistics. She is the mother of four bilingual children.
Selected Bibliography
Boerma, T., Leseman, P., Timmermeister, M., Wijnen, F., & Blom, E. (2016). Narrative abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with and without language impairment: Implications for clinical practice. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 51(6), 626-638.
Leadholm, B. J., & Miller, J. F. (1994). Language Sample Analysis: The Wisconsin Guide. Bulletin 92424.
Lipner, M., Armon-Lotem, S., Fichman, S., Walters, J., & Altman, C. (2024). Impact of narrative task complexity and language on macrostructure in bilingual kindergarten children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 55(2), 545-560.
Paradis, J. (2019). English second language acquisition from early childhood to adulthood: The role of age, first language, cognitive, and input factors. In Proceedings of the BUCLD, 43, 11-26.
