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Describes a research project in which the acquisition of French by two six-year-old boys, native speakers of English, was observed longitudinally. (CFM)

Background The body of literature on narratives of bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) is growing. However, little is known about the narrative abilities of bilingual preschool children with SLI and their patterns of growth. Aims To determine the similarities and differences in narrative abilities between preschoolers with and without SLI who are either monolingual or bilingual at two time points. Methods & Procedures Forty children completed a narrative retell task in English at two test points. The mean ages were 52 and 58 months at Times 1 and 2, respectively. We examined performance on measures of narrative macrostructure (narrative information) and microstructure (sentence length, number of different words, verb accuracy, first mentions) in monolingual and bilingual children with and without SLI. The bilingual children were from diverse first-language backgrounds and all spoke English most of the time. Outcomes & Results A series of repeated-measures analyses of variance was used with language ability (typical development or SLI) and bilingual status (monolingual versus bilingual) as the between-subjects factors and time (Times 1 or 2) as the within-subjects factor. Results indicated a significant main effect of time for four measures (i.e., Information Score, lexical diversity, sentence length and verb accuracy). The between-subjects analyses indicated a significant difference between the typically developing children and the children with SLI in all measures and a significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children for verb accuracy only. Conclusions & Implications This study showed that all four groups of children showed growth over a 6-month period and that bilingual children exposed predominantly to English in the home performed similarly to their monolingual peers in measures of narrative information, sentence length, number of different words and first mentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by post-structural perspectives of identities as processes of becoming and transculturation and transnationalism, this study explores how multilingual students in a Mandarin–English bilingual programme form their sense of identities in a dynamic process. Multiple forms of data are collected, including observations, interviews and documents. The findings indicate that multilingual students are mobile, namely, they move across linguistic, cultural and ethnic spaces of interaction. In addition, they challenge the dominant discourse of any fixed and hyphenated identity and take up transcultural and transnational identities that allow their comfortable circulation among different worlds. This study calls for a need to unfold children's multiple and mobile identities and explores new possibilities for life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]