Abstract
Squires, K. E., Lugo-Neris, M. J., Pena, E. D., Bedore, L. M., Bohman, T. M., & Gillam, R. B. (2014). Story retelling by bilingual children with language impairments and typically developing controls. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 49(1), 60–74.
Note: This article is available for free download from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3877674/ It contains a rubric that clinicians can use for scoring children’s retell tasks from the wordless picture book, One Frog Too Many (Mayer, 1975).
Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are challenged when evaluating bilingual children. There is relatively limited information regarding language development in bilingual children. Researchers have begun to establish norms for typically developing (TD) patterns of narrative development in bilingual children (Miller & Iglesias, 2008; Rojas & Iglesias, 2013; Uccelli & Paez, 2007). Narratives are frequently used as part of an assessment for students suspected of having a primary language impairment (PLI) because they provide clinicians with an efficient way to obtain information about a child’s knowledge of vocabulary, grammatical structures, and story structure. Furthermore, unlike many standardized language batteries that use separate tasks to assess vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and memory, producing narratives requires that students simultaneously integrate multiple language systems. Narrative retell tasks may offer a good measure of language proficiency in bilingual children because of the additional processing demands that occur with committing attentional and memory resources to processing long stretches of discourse in different languages (Gutierrez-Clellen, 2002).
Narratives can be described in terms of the structure of the entire story (macrostructure), and the specific types of words and sentences that make up the story (microstructure). Between kindergarten and mid- to upper elementary, TD children exhibit marked growth in narrative skills. They create stories that include macrostructure elements such as characters, setting, an initiating event, plans developed in response to the initiating event, actions to carry out the plans, a consequence, and internal responses felt by the characters in response to the initiating event or consequence (Stein, 1988). During the school-age years, children develop microstructure elements related to literate, decontextualized language, including more complex syntax with greater use of connective words, adverbs, elaborated noun phrases, and mental and linguistic verbs (Curenton & Justice, 2004; Westby, 2012) that provide information about speech acts (e.g., talk, say, shout, and whisper) and cognitive states (e.g., think, realize, and wonder).
The macrostructure of stories told by monolingual students with PLI is less complex than the macrostructure of stories told by TD children (Bishop & Donlan 2005; Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck, 2004), and children with PLI produce narratives that contain fewer complete story episodes than those narrated by their TD peers (Merritt & Liles 1987). Monolingual children with PLI also exhibit immature microstructures in their narratives as manifested by fewer mental and linguistic verbs (Bishop & Donlan 2005; Manhardt & Rescorla, 2002), and reduced lexical diversity (Fey, Catts, Proctor-Williams, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2004).
In this study, the researchers asked the following questions:
Do bilingual children with PLI and their TD peers differ on macrostructure elements of story retelling in both English and Spanish at kindergarten and first grade?
Do bilingual children with PLI and their TD peers differ on microstructure elements of story retelling in both English and Spanish at kindergarten and first grade?
Participants
Twenty-one bilingual Spanish–English participants with PLI were tested at both kindergarten and first grade using a battery of standardized tests for descriptive purposes. Each child identified with PLI was matched to a TD child based on sex, age in months at time of final testing (within 5 months), month of birth within 4 months, IQ (within 1 SD), score on the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (Bracken & McCallum, 1998), and language exposure. The following tests were administered to all children: Test of Language Development–Primary: Third edition (TOLDP: 3; Newcomer & Hammill, 1997), Test of Narrative Language (TNL; Gillam & Pearson, 2004), and Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA; Pena, Guttierrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2013). Kindergarten children with PLI performed significantly lower than their TD peers on all descriptive language measures. In addition, the students were assessed with informal measures (story retellings and narrative samples).
Procedures
Participants were asked to retell one of two wordless picture books, Frog On His Own (Mayer, 1973) or One Frog Too Many (Mayer, 1975), in both English and Spanish during their kindergarten and first-grade years. An examiner provided a model story, and then asked each child to retell the same story. The examiner showed the children the pictures as they told the story, and allowed children to review the pictures during retelling. To limit code switching, the researchers counterbalanced the language of testing and testing sessions across children.
Even though examiners were bilingual, all testing during a given data-collection session was done in one language. From kindergarten to first grade, each child retold the same stories in the same language. All stories were transcribed into Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; Miller & Iglesias, 2008).
Story macro- and microstructure elements were coded with an adaptation of the Monitoring Indicators of Scholarly Language (MISL; Gillam, Gillam, & Reese, 2012) tool. Specific rubrics for scoring retells of the Mayer wordless picture books Frog on His Own and One Frog Too Many were developed in both English and Spanish. The detailed macrostructure and microstructure rubrics are available in the article, which can be downloaded from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3877674/. Seven macrostructure elements (character, setting, initiating event, plan, action, consequence, and internal response) and five microstructure elements (coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, mental and linguistic verbs, adverbs, and elaborated noun phrases) were each scored on a scale from 0 to 3, with higher scores reflecting more complex narrative structures, yielding a total macrostructure score (with a possible score of 21) and a total microstructure score (with a possible score of 15).
Results
Macrostructure
The TD group outperformed the PLI group at both kindergarten and first-grade levels, with first graders performing higher than kindergarten children.
Although both groups exhibited gains in macrostructure scores from kindergarten to first grade, the TD group made significantly larger gains in macrostructure scores than the PLI group.
These results were true for both Spanish and English stories.
TD children improved their use of characters, initiating events, and internal responses in the Spanish retells at first grade. For their first-grade English retells, the TD children appeared to improve their use of characters, settings, actions, initiating events, and internal responses.
For children with PLI, their macrostructure improvements were limited to including more actions in their first-grade Spanish retells, and more characters and internal responses in their English retells.
Both TD and PLI children who had the most experience in English tended to earn higher English macrostructure scores and lower Spanish macrostructure scores.
Microstructure
There were significant changes in the Spanish microstructure scores from kindergarten to first grade for the TD children.
There were no significant changes in the microstructure scores from kindergarten to first grade for the stories told by the TD children in English.
The kindergarten English retellings by the children in the TD group contained more microstructure elements in every category—subordinating conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions, mental and linguistic verbs, adverbs, and elaborated noun phrases—than the retells by their PLI matches.
The majority of children in the TD group increased their use of coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions in the Spanish retells from kindergarten to first grade; however, these same microstructure elements decreased or remained stable over time in the English retells.
For the PLI children, there were no significant differences in the microstructure scores from kindergarten to first grade for the English or Spanish stories.
Cross-Language Influences
English and Spanish macrostructure scores were highly correlated for both the TD and PLI groups.
When language influence was held constant, the Spanish kindergarten macrostructure scores predicted the English first-grade macrostructure scores.
English and Spanish microstructure scores were not related across languages at either point in time.
Conclusion
TD children and children with PLI differed in the development of narrative macro- and microstructure between kindergarten and first grade. Compared with the children with PLI, the TD children had significantly higher macrostructure and microstructure scores in both languages in kindergarten and first grade, and made significantly greater gains in macrostructure scores in both languages and microstructure scores in Spanish.
The TD bilinguals transferred conceptually dependent macrostructure narrative skills easily but not the microstructure vocabulary, syntactic, and morphological skills. They needed to learn independently the microstructure nuances of both English and Spanish to be successful using literate microstructure language.
Results of the study indicate that macrostructure skills transfer across language, but microstructure skills do not. SLPs may, therefore, conclude that a bilingual student who generates stories with below age/grade-level structure is likely to have true language impairment. Determination of language impairment cannot be as easily made on the basis of bilingual students’ microstructure performance. A student tells a story with age-appropriate narrative macrostructure but with less age-appropriate microstructure. Delays and differences in microstructure skills are more likely to be related to second-language learning issues than are delays or differences in macrostructure skills. However, this study also indicates that bilingual students with PLI are much slower to make changes in microstructure skills than macrostructure skills. The rubric used in this study (which is readily available) has been shown to be sensitive to developmental changes in narrative micro- and macrostructure and, hence, could be useful as part of response to intervention (RtI) or part of dynamic assessments of bilingual students.