Background. Storytelling skills are essential for people in general and for analyzing the formation of child speech in particular. Oration, coherent speech, monologue, narrative, storytelling are all special names for the ability to generate oral texts, which precedes the written skills both in phylogenesis and in ontogenesis. Without analyzing the dynamics of storytelling, it is difficult to analyze the course of linguistic development in children, specifically in bilinguals.
The purpose of the study is to show on specific examples of mini-longitudinal research how the ability to create a narrative in Russian develops among bilingual preschoolers aged 5–7 years, whether this process has features that distinguish it from a similar process in monolingual children; to summarize the experience of narration training methods used abroad and to offer important didactic techniques for teaching how to create a coherent story.
Design. The features of monologue speech, methods of eliciting and evaluating narratives, their significance in pedagogy, linguistics, and psychology are highlighted. In the experimental part, Russian language stories of two bilingual Russian-Finnish bilinguals collected between the ages of five and seven years with an average time interval of six months are compared. Methods of teaching storytelling offered by foreign teachers are analyzed.
Results. It is demonstrated that the reference material is created for specific research purposes and can reflect more or less accurately the search for a solution to a certain linguistic, psychological, cultural, etc. problem. Adults do not expect logic from a small child but try to extract from what they hear the scheme of ideas that she/he has formed about the relationship of events in reality (if she / he says so, then she/he thinks so). The criteria for evaluating narratives are considered. As a result, it is reported that it is difficult to evaluate stories as an indicator of the verbal ability development. The techniques of storytelling supporting the development of coherent speech, and the dynamics of narrative ability are discussed. The article systematizes teaching methods of storytelling and suggests ways to support the development of the verbal ability.
Conclusion. At the end, it is concluded that in order to be able to tell stories, children need to be at a sufficient level of cognitive development, find relationships between the elements of a fragment of reality, know how the environment is arranged (they must have, to some extent, an established picture of the world), be equipped with sufficient phonetic, lexical and grammatical means, possess a suitable narrative genre and its components, select the right type of narration for the listener.