The onset of story comprehension and production in young Italian children learning English as a second language

Narrative competence is explored in children from 9 to 36 months of age learning ESL. This topic was previously studied in children with verbal capacities and therefore at older ages. Our study examines how very young children participate in the Narrative Format activity (NF, Taeschner, 2006) where the storytelling is performed with enhanced non-verbal communication (gestures, facial expressions) verifying: a) children anticipate adult’s gestures, thus showing very early knowledge of events’ sequencing, b) gesture’s anticipation is predicted by imitation. Videos of 57 Italian children interacting with their educator in child-care during the ESL NF activities were analysed with a specific software (Observer). Results show that children first imitate and next anticipate the educator’s gestures and that imitation is in fact a significant predictor of anticipation. These findings show that children have higher narrative competences than up to now observed when the means of communication are multimodal (gestures, verbal and narrative).