Narrative skills of Maltese bilingual children

Abstract

Children’s development of narrative skills, which include storytelling, retelling and narrative comprehension, is supported by and is intertwined with their cognitive, social, linguistic, and world knowledge. Narrative skills are usually present before children start acquiring literacy skills, with performance on retelling stories typically better than on telling tasks[DG1] . A prominent finding in bilingual children’s narrative development is that narrative macrostructure, that is, overall narrative organisation and subject matter, are not influenced by the level of proficiency in each language. There is insufficient research that studies the narrative abilities of Maltese Bilingual Children. The current study aimed to investigate the performance of Maltese children aged 6;00-6;11 in storytelling and retelling, as well as narrative comprehension tasks. It also aimed to investigate whether the level of language proficiency in Maltese or English affects Maltese Bilingual children’s macrostructure scores. In total, 20 participants were recruited for this study from Church and Independent Schools through random sampling. The children were assigned to Maltese-dominant (N[DG2] = 5), English-dominant (N =9 ) and balanced bilingual (N = 6) sub-groups. Each participant was assessed twice, once in Maltese and once in English, using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). The MAIN is an assessment that aims to evaluate both comprehension and production of narratives in children between the ages of three and ten. The data collected were then analysed statistically to understand the participants’ narrative abilities better and compare the narrative skills of children of different proficiency levels in Maltese and English. Results showed that overall Maltese Bilingual Children scored significantly higher in story re-telling than in storytelling tasks. It also showed that narrative scores did not vary considerably across children concerning their language dominance.