Question regarding obligatory contexts of tense morphemes in story retells

[Katya]

Dear all,

What will be the best way to determine obligatory contexts for the
past tense morpheme -ed and the present 3rd person singular morpheme –
s in story retells of children learning English as a second language?

I suppose in the strictest sense, the whole story should be in the
past tense. Many children, however, use the present tense correctly in
the story retell situation, perhaps as a sociolinguistic result of
their past storytelling experiences or perhaps from storytelling
tense transfer from their native language, Spanish. Then there are the
kids that will switch between the two tenses throughout their retell.
This is particularly difficult because if they use both morphemes in
one sample and then proceed to omit the tense morpheme in a certain
utterance, it is hard to determine what tense morpheme they are
omitting.

Overall, should the context be determined by the whole language sample
or at the sentence level?

Any suggestions would be helpful,

Thanks in advance,

Katya

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