From stories to literacy: oral narrative macrostructure and reading comprehension in bilingual children

Abstract Narratives have been an important tool in assessing children’s language skills. However, research on the contributions of narratives to literacy has been limited in bilinguals, especially in non-English language contexts. This longitudinal study investigated whether oral narrative macrostructure in kindergarten, assessed in both the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), uniquely predicts reading comprehension three years later. Participants were 54 Russian-German and Turkish-German bilingual children who completed oral narrative tasks ("telling") in both L1 and L2 in kindergarten. German word-level reading comprehension was assessed in Grade 1 and German text-level reading comprehension in Grade 3. Age in kindergarten, language group (Russian- vs. Turkish-German), word-level reading comprehension, and narrative length were included as control variables. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that L2 German narrative macrostructure in kindergarten contributed uniquely to German reading comprehension in Grade 3, above and beyond early word-level reading comprehension. In contrast, L1 narrative macrostructure (Russian/Turkish) did not account for additional variance over L2 skills. These findings underscore the role of early L2 oral narrative skills in supporting later reading comprehension in bilingual children. They highlight the importance of narrative competence as a foundational language skill and provide evidence for the inclusion of narrative measures in school readiness assessments.