Above and beyond the impacts of English vocabulary skills, children who displayed stronger story structure skills in Spanish in kindergarten had stronger storytelling skills in English in first grade. The relationship between narrative skills across languages is particularly intriguing. This shows that knowing and using a greater variety of words at age five is related to producing higher quality narratives at age six. Uccelli and Paez's study is also suggestive of a positive relationship between early Spanish storytelling skills and English narrative skills. First-grade Spanish narrative scores were best predicted by kindergarten Spanish vocabulary scores. Uccelli and Paez found that, on average, first-grade English narrative quality scores were higher among children who, at kindergarten scored higher on the English vocabulary test, used a greater number of distinct words in their English narrative, and had higher story structure scores on their Spanish narrative. In other words, are children who have stronger spoken English and/or Spanish skills as five year-olds at an advantage when they are asked to narrate stories in English at age six? The researchers were particularly interested in knowing whether children's English narrative scores in first grade were related to their English and Spanish language skills during kindergarten.
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As the authors state, "Even though it is expected that a bilingual child's vocabulary measured only in one language would not match that of a monolingual speaker, when bilingual children's vocabularies are too low in the language in which they are learning how to read, these young learners will certainly encounter difficulties. Despite the controversy of using monolingual norms to interpret bilingual children's vocabulary development, these assessments can be used to offer an estimate of the distance between these children and their monolingual peers. The authors call for a cautious interpretation of these findings. English vocabulary scores improved somewhat over time, but were consistently and considerably low even in first grade, a crucial year for learning how to read. The majority of children in the sample attended English-only classrooms, which probably contributed to the relatively flat Spanish vocabulary growth.
Spanish vocabulary scores tended to be lower than English scores and showed no improvement from kindergarten to first grade. While a few children displayed above average or close to average vocabulary skills in both languages, a majority of children performed considerably below the monolingual norms in Spanish and/or English. They were scored for the number of total words they used, the number of distinct words used, and two indicators of narrative quality: story structure score (inclusion of appropriate story elements and sequence) and language score (clarity and complexity of grammatical features in the story).įor both vocabulary and narrative skills, children were tested in English on one day and in Spanish on another, by native adult speakers who interacted with them only in the relevant language.
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In the narrative skills test, children were prompted to tell a story based on a series of three drawings. In the vocabulary test, the children were asked to say a word when a picture was shown. The assessment consisted of two parts: a vocabulary test and a narrative skills task.
The children participated in a language assessment in both Spanish and English in kindergarten and again in first grade. Uccelli and Paez's goal was to better understand how children's developing skills in Spanish and English support or conflict with one another in the area of narrative development. The children came from families in low socio-economic conditions who were already enrolled in a larger study, The Early Childhood Study of Language and Literacy Development of Spanish-Speaking Children (ECS). With her collaborator Mariela Paez, associate professor at Boston College, Uccelli examined the development of vocabulary and oral narrative skills among a group of 24 bilingual (Spanish/English) children living in communities in Massachusetts and Maryland. They focus on vocabulary and narrative, as these oral skills have been identified as foundational in children's literacy development. Harvard Graduate School of Education Assistant Professor Paola Uccelli and her colleagues seek to understand how early skills in spoken Spanish and English unfold and interact as children learn how to produce narratives in two languages. The exploration of oral language skills takes a twist when we consider children growing up in bilingual or multilingual environments. Children's reading and writing skills build off of their earlier emerging skills using spoken language.
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