The development of narrative competence is considered one of the basic competences in language acquisition. Children need to learn how to construct coherent stories, how to build coherence and meaning. Every language has its own linguistic features that come into play. How do children who grow up multilingually construct their storytelling and how do the different language systems interact with each other in storytelling? In order to develop first impressions, three trilingual children (3L1, French, German, English) and their parents were asked to orally tell the Frog story (Mayer 1969) in all three languages. The children were 6 years, 9 years and 11 years old at the time of the recordings. The recordings were transcribed. The categories of connection, cohesion, coherence and phenomena of transfer and/or crosslinguistic-influences are examined in their recordings. The questions are, for example, how the children succeed in establishing connection, e.g. via grammatical structures (e.g. tense), but also via text-linguistic factors such as connectors, referential networks, frames, etc. At the level of interaction, the study is particularly interested in code-switching phenomena and cross-linguistic influences (CLI). A further question is directed towards the possible influence of parental input - do linguistic structures and/or narrative patterns from the mother's story are repeated in the children's stories? All this can give first insights into the development of narrative competences in multilingual children as well as into the interaction of different language systems in storytelling..
In order to support and substantiate the results and also to work out special features for multilingual acquisition, the stories of the 3L1 narratives will be compared with stories from a learner corpus (L1 German, L2 English, L3 French) as well as with stories from monolingual subjects. Here, too, the Frog story was told in each case. Another aim is to analyse possible differences, at least in tendency, in the development of narrative competence.
Do multilingual subjects with parallel acquisition show similar interaction patterns between the different languages as learners with successive acquisition? How do they differ? Such a comparison allows the development of initial ideas with a view to possible different cognitive processing in multilingual acquisition, from which implications for the use of storytelling in foreign language teaching can arise.
Selected Bibliography:
Isbell, R., Sobol, J., Lindauer, L., & Lowrance, A. (2004). The effects of storytelling and story reading on the oral language complexity and story comprehension of young children. Early Childhood Education Journal, 32(3), 157-163.
Mustaba, M. (2008). Storytelling: A boon to children's language development. Journal of Urban Education: Focus on Enrichment, 5 (1) 68-73.
Nicholas, B., Rossiter M., & Abbott, M. (2011). The Power of story in the ESL classroom. The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes, 67(2), 247-268.
Peck, J. (1989). Using storytelling to promote language and literacy development. The Reading Teacher, 43(2), 138-141.
Speaker, K., Taylor, D., & Kamen, R. (2004). Storytelling: Enhancing language acquisition in young children. Education (Chula Vista), 125(1), 3-14.
