“I don’t like speaking Spanish:” delayed narration in children of Latino immigrants

The ability to tell a narrative upon entrance to kindergarten predicts expressive vocabulary and reading comprehension in fourth, seventh, and tenth grades. Current pervasive anti-immigrant environments and law enforcement practices have been shown to have a detrimental impact on a variety of developmental phenomena of immigrant children. Although it has not been extensively explored, narration ability may well be one of these, a gap this study seeks to address. The present study examined personal narratives of 14 children, aged four to ten, from Spanish-speaking immigrant homes. Results show that children’s narratives were considerably less well-structured than those of Spanish-speaking or English-speaking monolingual age peers. A possible explanation is that current immigration policy, which emphasizes deportation, may influence parents behavior and their socio-economic status and interfere with their inclination to foster their children’s Spanish skills and consequently with the children’s language and literacy development.