Bilingual and Monolingual Children's Narration : Discourse Strategies and Narrative Styles

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates twenty bilingual and twenty monolingual 6-year-old preschool children's discourse strategies and narrative styles. It is theoretically based on an interdiciplinary framework combining theories of narration with discourse theories. Methodologically, the study draws on micro-analyses of children's spontaneous sharing time narrations, on the one hand, and elicited retellings of a fable, on the other. A new method was developed for analysing Labovian story points from a collaborative perspective: differentiating between child contributions, teacher contributions, and joint contributions. Moreover, all children were interviewed about their literary repertoires and about narrative practices at home. It was found that children's vocabulary was closely linked to their literary repertoires and cultural habits. By calculating the repair:error ratio, the present study shows that there is a linear development in children's repair work, instead of an inverted U-curve as previously suggested. Language repairs were rare in both groups. The children primarily focused on meaning, not on linguistic form. However, there were more language errors in the bilingual group. Moreover, the bilingual group had a more restricted vocabulary. Yet, the findings reveal that narrative coherence was comparable in the monolingual and bilingual groups. In an analysis of participation during sharing time sessions, it was found that peer comments and child initiatives were more frequent in the monolingual group, and in specific preschool settings. Collaboration was investigated both in terms of teacher support, co-narration, and in  terms of indirect ways of collaborating, like the employment of communication strategies and self-repairs. It was found that bilingual children received  more collaborative support and employed more communication strategies than their monolingual peers.