Opportunities and challenges in the analysis of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children’s narratives. This carefully controlled test narrative abilities elicits rich set measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax, discourse-pragmatics, as well various aspects structure, communicative competence, language use (such code-switching). It is particularly suited study discourse cohesion, referential adequacy informativeness, course structure richness, acquisition more formal or literary register. In this commentary article, I reflect on five empirical papers included special issue. focus methodological challenges analysis narratives identify outstanding questions.