A Systematic Review of Research on Bilingual Children’s Narrative Skills

Abstract

Narrative skills represent an important benchmark in language and academic growth trajectories. While studies on bilingual children’s oral narrative production are common, the field lacks synthesis and identification research gaps. The present systematic review investigated trends in the research on bilingual children’s oral narrative production skills. Analysis included26 correlational studies with 33 independent samples (n = 1,657). The majority of studies focused on within-language relationships and cross-language macrostructure relationships of preschool and younger elementary school-aged bilinguals. Analysis revealed numerous distinct macrostructure and microstructure measures, as well as differences in story elicitation and analysis techniques. The review highlights the variation of methodology in the field while underscoring the need for further research into more unique bilingual language pairings and contexts, as well as on older elementary school-aged children.