Using Story Re-tell in Bilingual Assessment

Narrative has been used in the assessment of children’s language skills for some time but rarely with bilingual children (though see Gutiérrez-Clellen 2002). This paper examines narratives of a sample of German/English bilingual children in terms of standard measures and differences in the children’s retellings of a story. Whereas on the standard measures the bilinguals seem similar to monolinguals, the retellings show differences between the English- and German-dominant informants. These differences highlight the significance of examining discrete skills when profiling the language competences of bilingual children