The Development of a Spanish-English Bilingual Narrative Story Production Measure: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Source abstract

Language samples derived from narrative tasks, traditionally used in clinical settings, also provide valuable insight into the natural language abilities of both monolingual and multilingual children. This study describes the early development and initial testing of a narrative production measure designed for use in school settings serving linguistically diverse kindergarten and first-grade students. The measure was developed with attention to scalability, prioritizing a macrostructure-focused scoring protocol that could be administered and scored efficiently in educational contexts. Four wordless animated videos were created to elicit narratives, each depicting familiar situations with a clear story structure, with a problem and a solution. During piloting, the measure was administered to 1,246 Spanish-English bilingual students in California. Narratives were scored live using an initial eight-component dichotomous scheme targeting macrostructural elements. Evaluation of central tendencies confirmed that the measure was sensitive to variability in both English and Spanish. Psychometric evaluation refined the scoring system from eight to five reliable components, with sum scores demonstrating moderate to high within-language correlations. Cross-language correlations were weak ( r = .23), suggesting partially distinct linguistic constructs. Overall, findings support the development of a scalable narrative production measure appropriate for large-scale bilingual language screening in school settings.