Development Of Bilingual Children Research Articles

Good practice for pupils learning English as an additional language: Lessons from effective literacy teachers in inner-city primary schools

This article presents observations and discussion of the successful teaching of English to pupils, in English primary schools, for whom English is an additional language (EAL). It draws on research in Year 2 (6—7-year old) classes in three inner-city primary schools carried out in 2003 and 2005. Three recognized, effective teachers of literacy were selected for case study; all worked in successful schools where results for literacy, measured by national tests, were in line with or better than national averages. Following analyses of lesson observations and interviews with the teachers, their head teachers and the EAL coordinators in the schools, a number of common elements in their practice emerged. Discussion centres on how these pedagogical features supported effective learning environments for the early literacy development of bilingual children, and on the implications for the practice of teaching English to all pupils.

Miami and North Wales, So Far and Yet So Near: A Constructivist Account of Morphosyntactic Development in Bilingual Children

This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations – English–Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English–Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups reveals core commonalities. These core commonalities are posited to be a by-product of normal processes of language development, as seen from a constructivist view. These processes are outlined, and predictions based on them are discussed regarding key issues in bilingualism research, including whether bilinguals' two languages develop as autonomous or interactive systems, whether bilingual development is parallel in pacing and sequence to monolingual development, and whether bilingual attainment in their two languages is similar to that of monolinguals.

The development of bilingual children's early spelling in English.

By using an extended version of R. Treiman, M. Cassar, and A. Zukowski's (1994) flaps spelling task (wa_er, is it t or d in water?), the authors investigated the metalinguistic awareness of 6-year-old bilingual children from 3 different language backgrounds (LBs): English-LB (English-L1, Mandarin-L2), Chinese-LB (Mandarin-L1, English L2), and Malay-LB (Bahasa Malaysia-L1, English-L2). Treiman et al. found that unilingual English-speaking children's performance was poorer on flapped words than on control words and better on /d/ flaps than on /t/ flaps, suggesting phonology is salient even for beginners. The data for bilinguals revealed predictable group differences in the use of orthographic and phonological awareness for early spellings, even though the children were all attending the same English-medium kindergarten. Possible educational implications for linguistic minority children are briefly discussed.

The Role of Acquisition and Learning In Young Children's Bilingual Development: A Sociocultural Interpretation

This paper takes a sociocultural approach to exploring the factors that enhance young children's bilingual development. The language excerpts presented were gathered as part of a three-year Early Childhood Centre of Innovation project funded by the New Zealand government. Data gathered in this project challenge Krashen's (1981) position that young children will generally acquire another language through subconscious osmosis, rather than through the conscious effort of learning. Evidence is put forward that illustrates how young children's bilingual development is in fact mediated by their teachers and peers, as well as the cultural tools provided in the environment and the nature of the language input itself. Young children are also revealed as active language learners who interact collaboratively with others and with their environment. Thus, the value of early childhood teachers in taking a more proactive role to support the process of young children's bilingual development is affirmed.

Language Discourses and Ideologies at the Heart of Early Childhood Education

This paper identifies: (a) discourses that shape immigrant parents' and early childhood educators' views of young children's bilingual development, and (b) ways in which these discourses are manifested in the everyday lives of immigrant parents as well as in the practices of early childhood educators. The findings of a study in a mid-size Canadian city are reported and interpreted from the perspective of the role of power relations in language and using critical discourse analysis. The paper explains how dominant language discourses manifest themselves in parents' views of their children's language development and in the practices of early childhood educators. In addition, it explains how those discourses become ideological. The following issues are discussed: how is the importance of dominant and minority languages shaped? How do monolingual discourses shape parental and institutional language responsibilities? How do parents confront language domina-tion? How do early childhood educators make sense of their work with bilingual families? The paper concludes that dominant ideologies of language need to be challenged to ensure the maintenance of home languages among immigrant families with young children.

A Bilingual Web Site for Chinese-Speaking Families and Professionals

A Bilingual Web Site for Chinese-Speaking Families and Professionals

Developmental perspectives on bilingual Swedish-Arabic children with and without language impairment: a longitudinal study.

There is a need for studies on bilingual language acquisition in combination with language impairment (LI). The speech and language clinician must have tools to differentiate between problems depending on inadequate exposure to a language and problems depending on a LI. Another important issue is the pace of bilingual language acquisition relative to the severity of LI. To investigate grammatical development over 12 months in both languages in 10 Swedish-Arabic pre-school children with severe LI and 10 Swedish-Arabic pre-school children without LI. The children were matched for age, gender, exposure to Swedish dialect, and exposure to Arabic dialect. The developmental hierarchy predicted by Processability Theory was used in tests in both Swedish and Arabic. Processability Theory was used as a yardstick to measure grammatical development in both languages. Bilingual children, both with and without LI, developed grammatical structures in Swedish and Arabic in the same implicational way. Children with severe LI could develop two languages, although the pace of development was much slower in both languages. Bilingual children with severe LI were also more vulnerable to limited exposure of both their languages. A developmental perspective is important to understand the nature of LI in bilingual children. The results also have implications for the assessment of language development in bilingual children with severe LI, since a hardly perceptible development over time is observed.

Measuring language development in bilingual children: Swedish- Arabic children with and without language impairment

Data from ten Swedish-Arabic preschool children with language impairment and ten Swedish-Arabic children with normal language development matched for age and exposure to Swedish were analyzed. Specific tasks for both Swedish and Arabic were designed. By using the hierarchy predicted by processability theory as a yardstick, grammatical development was measured in the two languages of the children. The basic assumption is that there is a developmental sequence that all language learners follow on their way toward a target language. The results show that the bilingual children with language impairment tend to have a balanced low level of language development in both languages, whereas the bilingual children with normal language development show a higher level of language development in at least one language.

Language Development and Delay in Internationally Adoped Infants and Toddlers

When children change cultures through adoption, they experience a transition from a birth first language to a new adoptive first language. Because adoptive families rarely speak the birth language, use of that language arrests at the time of adoption and undergoes attrition while the child learns the new adopted language. During this process, internationally adopted children have limited abilities in both languages. This makes it difficult to determine which children require speech and language services, and which will learn the new language spontaneously over time. This article reviews information on arrested language development in bilingual children and applies it to the internationally adopted child. The influence of cross-linguistic patterns of transfer and interference in infants and toddlers is explored, along with the medical and developmental risks associated with children adopted from orphanages. The primary goal of this article is to help professionals understand post-adoption language learning issues affecting internationally adopted children, as well as the impact of preadoption history on those developmental processes.

Character referencing in English and Chinese storybooks written for children

The texts of 12 English and 12 Chinese children's books were analysed for how they referred to the main characters in the stories. Comparisons were made between referring expressions used in six texts for early-level readers and six texts for mid-level readers in both languages. There were no differences found between early- and mid-level texts in their use of full expressions, pronouns or ellipsis within the two languages. However, the Chinese books at both levels contained significantly more elliptical expressions than the English books, and there was a trend for the Chinese books to use fewer pronominal expressions than the English books. Finally, contexts of use for the full expressions indicated that these expressions tended to occur where something in the discourse was changing: moves in and out of the story frame, moves involving a shift in character or time and place of the story, and moves in and out of quoted speech. Full expressions were also used to resolve ambiguity. These differences between Chinese and English books in the use of ellipsis and pronouns are related to the features of the languages (Chinese as a prodrop language). The occurrence of full expressions in contexts of discourse shift is used to refute Halliday and Hasan's (1976) closed text theory of discourse cohesion. Implications for literacy development in bilingual children are also discussed.

Orthographic and Cognitive Factors in the Concurrent Development of Basic ReadingSkills in English and Persian

According to the “script dependent” hypothesis, accurate word recognition skills develop more slowly in languages with an irregular orthography, such as English, than in regular orthographies, such as Persian. According to the “central processing” hypothesis, basic reading skills in all languages are influenced primarily by underlying cognitive factors. These hypotheses were examined by studying the linguistic, cognitive, and basic reading skills of 70 children in Grades 1–5 learning to read concurrently in English (L1) and Persian (L2). Our findings supported both hypotheses. A consideration of these frameworks as complementary contributes to a crosslinguistic theory of reading skills development in bilingual children.

Cognitive Development in Bilingual Children: A Case for Bilingual Instruction in Early Childhood Education

Abstract This article overviews the research on the complex relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development and the important implications of this relationship for bilingual education. Recent studies are discussed that examine the cognitive development in bilingual children with regard to metalinguistic awareness, concept formation, and analogical reasoning. A case is made for additive bilingual instruction in early childhood programs as a means of reinforcing the productive and receptive knowledge of the first language during this critical period of linguistic, social, and cognitive development.

Theoretical and Practical Implications of Assessing Cognitive and Language Development in Bilingual Children with Qualitative Methods

Abstract This study has the objective of using qualitative data to support theoretical and practical implications of important methodological problems affecting the assessment of bilingual children’s cognitive and language development. Three instruments were used for accurately identifying gifted students among seventeen Hispanic bilingual kindergartners (first, second, and third generation Mexican-Americans) from low socioeconomic backgrounds: (1) a Home Language Survey, (2) a locally-designed Teachers’ and Parents’ Rating Scale of Creativity, and (3) the Qualitative Use in English and Spanish of Tasks (QUEST) measuring cognitive and language development in bilinguals (Gonzalez, 1991, 1994, 1995). Using chi-square tests and case studies, six interacting patterns were found indicating the influence of first and second language, verbal and non-verbal assessment procedures, multiple measurements and informants, individualizing assessment, and evaluators’ personalities on the assessment of bilingual children...

A Model of Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Variables Affecting Bilingual Hispanic Children's Development of Concepts and Language

The objective of this study was to construct a model of cognitive, cultural, and linguistic variables influencing bilingual children 's verbal and nonverbal conceptual development. Subjects were 30 Hispanic children, aged 6 to 7, from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. For testing the model, five verbal and nonverbal classification tasks were administered in a counterbalanced order in Spanish and English using food and animal objects as stimuli. Tasks were scored twice based on gender or any other valid criteria for classification (e.g., color; functions, subcategories). Findings revealed that bilingual children construct universal nonverbal and semantic representations influenced by culture and language. The Test of Nonverbal Intelligence and the IDEA Oral Proficiency Test underestimated bilingual children 's development, as they achieved at or above their chronological-developmental levels in classification tasks. Implications for accurately assessing bilingual children's cognitive language development are derived.

Early Childhood Bilingualism

Although a number of researchers over the years have focused on the language development of bilingual children, we currently possess only a fragmentary picture of the total phenomenon. Further, what appears to be known about the processes involved may need reexamination in light of recent theoretical and empirical work. It is the purpose of this article to review recent research (i.e., that done within the last five to six years), as well as to discuss difficulties inherent in research on bilingual children. In addition, the article argues for a multidisciplinary approach to research in the area and outlines suggested avenues of inquiry within such a framework. Throughout, the focus is on children's bilingual acquisition in naturalistic settings (i.e., prior to school attendance).

Bilingualism and education.

The concept of bilingualism as applied to individual children and to educational programs is discussed, and the history of research on bilingual children and bilingual education programs in the United States is reviewed. Bilingualism has been defined predominantly in linguistic dimensions despite the fact that bilingualism is correlated with a number of nonlinguistic social parameters. The linguistic handle has served policymakers well in focusing on an educationally vulnerable population of students, but the handle is inadequate as the single focus of educational intervention. Future research will have to be directed toward a multifaceted vison ofbilingualism as a phenomenon embedded in society. Bilingualism is a term that has been used to describe an attribute of individual children as well as social institutions. At both levels, the topic has been dominated by controversy. On the individual level, debate has centered on the possible costs and benefits of bilingualism in young children. On the societal level, fiery argument can be witnessed in the United States about the wisdom of bilingual education and the official support of languages other than English in public institutions. Particularly in the latter case, emotions run hot because of the symbolism contained in language and its correlation with ethnic group membership. The controversy surrounding bilingualism is magnified by a sense of urgency generated by the changing demographic picture. In the United States, there are over 30 million individuals for whom English is not the primary language of the home. Of those, 2.5 million are children in the school age range, with this number expected to double by the year 2000. There are now many states in which the linguistic-minority school population is approaching 25% or more (Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, New York, and Texas), and in many large urban school districts throughout the United States, 50% of the students may come from nonEnglish-speaking homes. Whether the debate is over the merits of bilingualism in individuals or institutions, there is considerable confusion over a basic definitional issue. The problem can be succinctly stated as follows: Is bilingualism strictly the knowledge and usage of two linguistic systems, or does it involve the social dimensions encompassed by the languages? Oscillation between these linguistic and social perspectives on bilingualism has frequently led to misconceptions about the development of bilingual children as well as misunderstanding in educational initiatives to serve linguistic-minority populations. As a case in point, consider the linguistic and social complexities contained in the following statement about school experiences by a ninth-grade Mexican-born boy who had immigrated from Mexico six months earlier. There is so much discrimination and hate. Even from other kids from Mexico who have been here longer. They don't treat us like brothers. They hate even more. It makes them feel more like natives. They want to be American. They don't want to speak Spanish to us, they already know English and how to act. If they're with us, other people will treat them more like wetbacks, so they try to avoid us. (Olsen, 1988, p. 36) Bilingualism, thought of simply as a bivariate function of linguistic proficiency in two languages, underrepresents the intricacies of tbe social setting. The history of research on bilingual children contains many false inferences about the effects of bilingualism based on a miscalculation of the complexity of the phenomenon. Similarly, current research to evaluate bilingual education programs takes an extremely narrow definition of bilingualism, that is, as the usage of two languages in instruc-

Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational Development of Bilingual Children

Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational Development of Bilingual Children