Umeå University's logo

Relevance: Research on the narratives of bilingual children is extremely important, as it shows the child’s full linguistic competence, which in turn will allow teachers and educators to choose the appropriate program. The purpose of this article is to analyze the narratives of Russian-Swedish billing children. The author examines both mistakes (or “innovations”) and strategies that are used by children with a lack of lexical and / or grammatical means. An attempt will also be made to explain the cause of the observed phenomena.

Description of the research progress: The study involved 25 Russian-Swedish bilingual’s children aged from 4.5 years to 9.2 years. The material for this study was collected using a specially developed tool for collecting narratives Litmus MAIN (The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). In addition to storytelling from pictures, spontaneous speech data and ethnolinguistic observations were collected.

Results: The study showed that many children were unfamiliar with the Russian equivalent of Swedishwords and often used gestures when they did not know the word. Swedish was often used for metalinguistic comments and questions. Children were prone to lexical innovation and changing the meaning of words. They often mixed synonyms or lexical units close in meaning or sound. Children with weak Russian language had cases of transfer, as well as the following grammatical errors: incorrect case endings, mistakes in choosing the verb gender, the use of an incorrect preposition and case form, errors in using an accusative instead of a locative and errors in the form of a verb.

Conclusion: Considering the features of children’s narratives, the author shows how the lack of input and dominant language affects their stories. Since language acquisition in Sweden takes place in a specif iccontext, the input is often limited to situations that the child encounters in daily life. In this regard, parents and teachers of their native language need to find more opportunities to practice the Russian language. It is necessary to create language situations in which children will want to talk about what happened to them. It is important for parents and teachers to try to motivate the child to tell it in Russian, to find time to play together, listen to the child, engage in joint activities and help find lexical means to express their thoughts.