Structural features of narratives produced by bilingual children living in Kyrgyz Republic

Abstract

The article deals with Russian-language narratives produced by bilingual children aged 4–6 year, living in Kyrgyzstan and speaking both Russian and Kyrgyz languages. Children are developing in the situation of «mixed bilingualism», with Russian as a dominant language. Narratives were collected using the MAIN experimental tool, which includes several sets of pictures for telling/retelling stories, standard texts for retellings, and tables for evaluating speaking skills. In the article we consider the features of macro- and microstructure of narratives. The macrostructural characteristics of the text are i.e. the completeness of the story itself, coherence, story logic, verbal expression of the internal states of the characters. All our informants were able to create a complete outline of the story, mentioning all the main episodes and involving all the main characters. The children, however, mainly paid attention to the actually performed, really visible actions of the characters (story elements “attempt” and “result of the action”) and less often expressed verbally internal motives, goals, and intentions. As for the internal states, the children mainly described specific actions that they were able to understand unambiguously (ex., they used the verbs of visual perception, mental actions and speech). They described emotions and physical states more rarely. Characteristics of the microstructure include the length of the text and the utterance, lexical and grammatical correctness of speech, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity. In the microstructure, no significant differences were revealed between children of different age groups: children aged 5 years old, in general, coped with generating narratives more successfully than children aged 4 and 6 years old. The errors mostly belong to the lexical and grammatical levels of the language system: the most common errors are caused by the use of strategies that facilitate language acquisition and are typical either for both bilingual and monolingual children (strategies of simplification and overgeneralization) or those who acquire a second language (grammatical transfer from the first language).

Keywords

• narrative
• experiment
• children’s speech
• language acquisition
• bilingualism
• macrostructure of narrative
• microstructure of narrative
• speech skills
• narrative competence