Telling Stories in Two Languages

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on languageacquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychologyand psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in orderto understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like memory, perception, andmetalinguistic awareness. Telling Stories in Two Languages contributes to the general upsurge inlinguistically related studies of bilingual children. The book's particular and unique focus isnarrative development in a bilingual and multicultural context.The book is particularly important in an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural UnitedStates, where there are large numbers of children from increasingly diverse cultural and linguisticbackgrounds. Telling stories is important in the context of language and communicationdevelopment because it is often by means of this activity that children develop the skill ofpresenting a series of events both in speech and writing. However, varying concepts of literacy exist in different societies, and literacyhas different social and personal implications in different social and cultural contexts. In our schools, teachers are expected to teachwhat is relevant for students in the dominant cultural framework, but it would benefit those teachers greatly to have an understanding ofimportant differences in, for example, narrative styles of different cultures.Bilingualism or even multilingualism is all around us. Even in the United States, where a single language is clearlypredominant, there are hundreds of languages spoken. Speaking more than one language may not be typical, but is so common inmodern times that it would be senseless to ignore its many implications. The study of narratives told by children in both English andJapanese that are presented in this book will provide an important point of reference for research aimed at teasing apart the relativecontributions of linguistic abilities and cultural conceptions to bilingual children's narrativedevelopment.