ABSTRACT
Research on first-language (L1) acquisition has shown children to command many of the grammatical principles and rules governing their native language by the age of four years (e.g., Slobin 1985; Berman & Slobin 1994; Berman 1997b; Radford 1995). However, language development both at the level of grammar and at that of preferences for language usage has also been shown to continue into the early school years (Hickmann 1995; Nippold 1998), and into the later school years (Berman & Slobin 1994; Berman & Verhoeven 2002a, 2002b). The narrative also constitutes a significant domain for later language acquisition. Around the age of five, for example, developmental shifts have been found to occur from the use of intra-sentential devices to the use of inter-sentential devices, basic structures to additional functions, and extra-linguistic abilities to intra-linguistic abilities (cf. Karmiloff-Smith 1992). In many parts of the world, children are part of an ethnic minority group whose language is different from the dominant or standard language of the society in which they live. The question, then, is how narratives develop for minority children living in a multilingual environment. In this chapter, an attempt will be made to shed light on this question with a special focus on minority populations in Western Europe.
