Heritage language maintenance and development depend on family language policy language dominance frequency of use linguistic distance and similarity between the minority and the majority languages or (dia)lects of the society (Montrul 2016; Polinsky 2015 2018; Kupisch and Rothman 2018) multi-directionality of cross-linguistic influence and accommodation (Rothman et al. 2019). The present study investigates narrative skills of Russian heritage children in Cyprus with the focus on macro-structure (story structure structural complexity and internal states terms) micro-structure and grammaticality i.e. the extent to which utterances follow the grammatical rules of a language. Grammaticality in narrative tasks can predict language development (Restrepo 1998; Bedore et al. 2010). Narratives can measure cognitive linguistic and social skills of bilingual and multilingual children in a less biased way than standardized assessments of language (Botting 2002; Fiestas and Peña 2004; Cleave et al. 2010; Thordardottir 2011; Terry et al. 2013). Narratives can help to identify linguistic cognitive semantic and social abilities communicative competence and cultural awareness of a child (Schneider and Hayward 2002; Leonard 1998; McCabe 1992; Liles 1993; Hughes et al. 1997; Botting 2002; Paradis et al. 2010). Narrative skills are essential for children’s success at school (Bishop and Edmundson 1987; Bliss et al. 1998; McCabe 1996; McCabe and Rollins 1994; Westby 1991). There is a relationship between oral language (experience with and exposure to discourse) and literacy (Westby 2005; Snow 2002). Cultural communities language environment home language use parental attitudes towards bilingual and bi-cultural learning the level of language proficiency are some of the factors that can affect the development of narrative abilities (Fiestas 2004; Jia et al. 2011). The participants of the study were 40 Russian–Cypriot Greek (CG) simultaneous bilingual children. Their age ranges from 4;0 to 6;0 (mean 5;2) and they attend kindergarten and primary CG schools where the language of instruction is Greek. The LITMUS-MAIN the multilingual assessment instrument for narratives (Gagarina et al. 2012 2015) was used for data collection. Their language proficiency in Russian was measured by the Russian Proficiency Test for Multilingual Children (RPTMC) (Gagarina et al. 2010). Background information was collected using parental questionnaires and interviews. The narratives were recorded transcribed and analyzed in terms of grammaticality. Grammaticality percentages were calculated for each child. The analysis of the data showed that Russian heritage children had a similar error pattern despite the morphological richness of the environmental language (Gagarina et al. 2019). The errors were found in aspect and tense case gender and in subject-verb agreement. Some code-switching errors were revealed in the data as well as innovation forms of words (nouns and verbs). There was a deviant production in terms of words order lexical stress prepositions and prefixes.Overall it was found that grammaticality is affected by the quantity and quality of input the child receives in the weaker (heritage) language parents’ level of education and their willingness to use maintain and transmit Russian to their children and to develop their literacy in L1 Russian. There is also a correlation between macro- micro-structure and grammaticality.

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