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School-Year Grammatical Development in Narrative Retells: Spanish-English Dual Language Learners

Oral narrative retells are rich sources of information for language development. Investigators collected English-language oral narrative retells during the fall and spring from 65 Spanish-English-speaking dual language learners (DLL) in kindergarten and first grade. Investigators examined transcripts of oral narratives for (a) inclusion and accuracy of microstructural elements using the Narrative Assessment Protocol (NAP; Pence, Justice, & Gosse, 2007), (b) percentage of grammatical utterances, and (c) types of verb errors. Prepositional phrases, elaborated noun phrases, irregular past tense verbs, and copula verbs were the most prevalent grammatical forms. Omission errors were the most prevalent verb error type. DLLs’ narrative retells revealed significantly increased number of total NAP codes and diversity of NAP codes. Grammaticality of utterances increased from approximately 77% to 87% from fall to spring. All verb errors types decreased over the academic year. Direct feature coding approaches are useful for tracking developmental progress in DLLs’ retells.