The second part of this book picks up where the first leaves off and looks at the more monologic narrative accomplishments of diverse Spanish-speaking children. This part consists of four chapters that examine relatively unscaffolded narration in 3- through 11-year-old children from Mexico, Andean Peru, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic, some of whom now reside in the United States. After years of conversation with parents, how do Spanish-speaking children narrate more or less on their own? The answer to this question leads us quite naturally to the consequences of cultural differences in narrative structure for literacy acquisition, the topic of the third and final part of our book. The primary goal here is to sensitize readers to unique features of Spanish narrative structure in order to prevent misdiagnosis of cultural differences as deficits. As will be shown, all four chapters document some important differences between Latino and various types of Anglo American storytelling.

Wishard Guerra's chapter 7 makes a number of important contributions. First, she looks at early scaffolding by mothers and relates that scaffolding to older children's stand-alone narratives, which makes this chapter an excellent bridge from Part One to Part Two. Second, she documents a developmental sequence for Mexican-heritage American children that is remarkably similar to that shown previously for Anglo children (Peterson & McCabe, 1983): moving from a primarily maternal online description of actions at 3 years of age and ending at the high-point form (19%) at 4 years; 6 months to predominantly (77%) classic narrative structure in conversations with the researcher at age 6.