What is it about?
This study examined how bilingual preschoolers in Israel tell stories in both English and Hebrew. Researchers found that children told better-structured stories in their home language (English). Importantly, when parents read books with their children in English at home, it helped improve their storytelling skills in Hebrew too, showing that literacy practices in one language support the other.
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Why is it important?
The study supports Cummins' Interdependence Hypothesis - the idea that underlying language skills transfer between a bilingual person's languages. This means storytelling ability isn't learned separately in each language, but draws on shared cognitive skills.
Perspectives
The study provides evidence that supporting a child's home language doesn't hurt their development in the societal language - it actually helps. This can help parents feel confident reading to children in their native language, knowing it benefits both languages. Moreover, it offers speech-language pathologists guidance on assessment and intervention. It shows that professionals working with bilingual children should consider home language practices and recognize that skills developed in one language support the other. Finlly, and mabe even most important, it challenges the "majority language-only" approaches in schools. The findings suggest that maintaining home language literacy is educationally beneficial, not detrimental.
Professor Sharon Armon-Lotem
Bar Ilan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Are Narrative Macrostructure Skills Shared in Bilingual Children's Two Languages, and What Predicts Them?, Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, November 2025, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2025_lshss-25-00049.
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