Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/strjez/51-2/4
Home literacy environment and narrative abilities in bilingual speakers of Croatian and Italian
Gordana Dobravac
orcid.org/0000-0003-3394-1985
; Juraj Dobrila University of Pula
Đeni Zuliani Blašković
orcid.org/0000-0001-6839-856X
; Juraj Dobrila University of Pula
Abstract
The aim of this study is twofold: to describe the home literacy environment (HLE) activities
of Italian-Croatian bilingual families, and to investigate the impact of HLE on the narrative
abilities of bilingual children. The participants were 20 preschool children, bilingual speakers
of Croatian and Italian, with Croatian as their dominant language. Narrative abilities were
assessed on both macrostructure and microstructure levels. Oral language samples were
obtained using the elicitation narrative material in MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2012) adapted for
Croatian (Hržica and Kuvač Kraljević, 2019) and Italian (Levorato and Roch, 2019), while
data on HLE were gathered by means of a questionnaire. The results suggest that HLE activities,
such as reading books and telling stories to children, do not have the same status with
regard to language. Furthermore, HLE activities in the dominant language support the child’s
narrative abilities in the dominant language, while activities in the non-dominant language
have no impact on the non-dominant language. Different parent activities are related to different
outcomes: the frequent reading of books to the child shows a positive relationship with
the child’s narrative microstructure, while the early introduction of telling stories to the child
had an impact on the child’s narrative macrostructure.
Keywords
bilingualism, home literacy development,, narrative skills, preschoolers
Hrčak ID:
289478
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2022.
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