Personal Narratives of Monolingual and Multilingual Children in Iceland

Abstract

Personal narratives are a substantial part of daily communication. People take turns sharing what has happened to them, recounting stories, events and feelings from their lives with others (Peterson & McCabe, 2013). Personal narratives are an important aspect of understanding one’s own emotions and thoughts, as well as conveying feelings and ideas (Bruner, 1990).

Recent studies have shown that analysing children’s personal narratives can serve as a useful language assessment tool in a multilingual world, as it provides a comprehensive and rich sample of a child’s functional language skills, reflecting daily communication. However, few tools and methods are available for speech-language pathologists to evaluate these skills in culturally and linguistically diverse children. To address this urgent need and gap in existing knowledge, members of the Child Language Committee of the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP) founded a special interest group called the Global TALES (Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories) Network. The Global TALES Network currently involves more than 50 researchers from 26 countries worldwide, investigating personal narratives in school-age children using the Global TALES protocol (Westerveld et al., 2023).

A strong language foundation is a key prerequisite for literacy and proficiency in Icelandic, and it is one of the biggest influencing factors in children’s learning at all levels of the Icelandic school system (Jóhanna T. Einarsdóttir et al., 2016). In Iceland, the number of children growing up in multilingual environments has increased significantly in recent years, and research findings show that these children struggle more than their monolingual peers to acquire the Icelandic language. This is especially true when language proficiency is measured using standardised tests (Elín Þöll Þórðardóttir & Anna Guðrún Júlíusdóttir, 2013; Hjördís Hafsteinsdóttir et al., 2022). The language used in personal narratives is simpler than in standardised tests, and focus solely on spoken language rather than complex academic vocabulary or written language (Freeman & Schroeder, 2022; Gagarina et al., 2016; Nippold et al., 2005).

The objective of this study was to use the Global TALES protocol to compare language skills and discussion topics between a group of multilingual children and a group of monolingual children in Iceland.

The study involved 42 children, including 27 monolingual and 15 multilingual participants, aged 9 years and 3 months to 10 years and 9 months. Most of the multilingual children were born in Iceland (all except one) and had attended Icelandic preschools and primary schools. The multilingual children were included in the study because their parents spoke a language other than Icelandic at home. However, many of these multilingual children spoke Icelandic and English at home, in addition to their heritage language. A larger proportion of parents of monolingual children had attained university degree (74%) compared to parents of multilingual children (47%).

The results showed that multilingual children expressed themselves in significantly fewer sentences, used significantly fewer words, had a significantly less diverse vocabulary and had a significantly shorter mean length of utterance compared to their monolingual peers. They also made proportionally many more grammatical errors. Multilingual participants had a proportion of grammatical errors that was, on average, three standard deviations below the monolingual mean. As discussion topics, the children in both groups spoke about how moments of happiness were found in spending time with their families, but the monolingual children also mentioned personal achievements. Both groups discussed interactions with friends and siblings in relation to events that caused them anger, and they expressed pride in their personal achievements. School was a more frequent topic of discussion for multilingual children, both in terms of worries and significant matters. Many of the multilingual children had difficulties understanding the prompts in the stories and needed explanations, which was generally not the case for monolingual children. The findings suggest that multilingual children who have grown up in Iceland face significant challenges in recounting personal events from their daily lives in Icelandic, although the topics discussed are similar to those of their monolingual peers.

These findings indicate that the Global TALES protocol is effective for comparing personal narratives between monolingual and multilingual children in Iceland. In future studies it would be interesting to compare the language proficiency of multilingual children in their home language versus the community language, Icelandic.