Telling Stories in Two Languages

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language
acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology
and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order
to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and
metalinguistic awareness. Telling Stories in Two Languages contributes to the general upsurge in
linguistically related studies of bilingual children. The book's particular and unique focus is
narrative development in a bilingual and multicultural context.
The book is particularly important in an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural United
States, where there are large numbers of children from increasingly diverse cultural and linguistic
backgrounds. Telling stories is important in the context of language and communication
development because it is often by means of this activity that children develop the skill of
presenting a series of events both in speech and writing. However, varying concepts of literacy exist in different societies, and literacy
has different social and personal implications in different social and cultural contexts. In our schools, teachers are expected to teach
what is relevant for students in the dominant cultural framework, but it would benefit those teachers greatly to have an understanding of
important 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 clearly
predominant, there are hundreds of languages spoken. Speaking more than one language may not be typical, but is so common in
modern times that it would be senseless to ignore its many implications. The study of narratives told by children in both English and
Japanese that are presented in this book will provide an important point of reference for research aimed at teasing apart the relative
contributions of linguistic abilities and cultural conceptions to bilingual children's narrative
development.