Working With Bilingual Language Disability

Using an interdisciplinary perspective to discuss the intersection of language development and learning processes, this book summarizes current knowledge and represents the most critical issues regarding early childhood research, policy, and practice related to young bilingual children with disabilities. The book begins with a conceptual framework focusing on the intersection between the fields of early childhood education, bilingual education, and special education. It goes on to review and discuss the role of bilingualism in young children’s development and the experiences of young bilingual children with disabilities in early care and education settings, including issues of eligibility and access to care, instruction, and assessment. The book explores family experiences, teacher preparation, accountability, and policy, ending with recommendations for future research which will inform both policies and practices for the education of young bilingual children with disabilities. This timely volume provides valuable guidance for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and researchers.

Language Disorders in Bilingual Children and Adults, Third Edition, provides speech-language pathologists, advanced students in communication disorders programs, and clinical language researchers with information needed to formulate and respond to questions related to effective service delivery to bilingual children and adults with suspected or confirmed language disorders. The bilinguals of interest represent varying levels of first and second language proficiency across the lifespan. That is, bilingualism is not determined here by proficiency in each language, but rather by the individual's experience or need for two languages. In separate chapters, the book synthesizes the literature on bilingual children and adults with typical and atypical language skills. These chapters give the reader a deep understanding of the multiple factors that affect language development and disorders in those who rely on two languages for meaningful interactions. Chapters on assessment and intervention issues and methods are then presented for each population. For children, the text focuses on developmental language disorder but also discusses secondary language disorders (such as autism spectrum disorder) in bilingual populations. For adults, the focus is on aphasia, with additional discussion of dementia, traumatic brain injury, and right hemisphere disorder. Although child and adult, typical and atypical populations are presented separately, all are considered within a unifying Dynamic Interactive Processing perspective and within a new Means-Opportunities-Motives framework for understanding language disorders in bilinguals. This broad theoretical framework emphasizes interactions between social, cognitive, and communicative systems to form the basis for very practical implications related to assessment and intervention. This third edition has been completely updated to reflect the current research on bilingual populations and the best practices for working with them. Studies at the intersection of bilingualism and language disorders have expanded to include additional disorders and new language combinations. The authors synthesize the current literature and translate it for clinical use. New to the Third Edition • Coauthors Kerry Danahy Ebert, PhD, CCC-SLP and Giang Thuy Pham, PhD, CCC-SLP • Updated literature review and references to reflect new research on bilingualism, cultural competence, cognitive advantages and clinical practice with linguistically diverse populations • Case studies on assessment with bilingual children and adults • Additional tables and figures summarizing key information • Available evidence on additional child and adult language disorders in bilinguals • Updated extension activities and resource supplement

The decision to write this book was taken by a group of practising speech therapists who worked with bilingually language handi capped children in the UK. They formed a professional interest group called the Specific Interest Group in Bilingualism because of the need felt by speech therapists to have some forum for discuss ing the challenges posed by the assessment and treatment of the bilingually language handicapped. In these regular discussion groups it became clear that similar experiences were encountered by all speech therapists working with these client populations up and down the country. They centred on managing the linguistic diversity, the need for develop mental language information, the need for appropriate assessment protocols, the recruitment of bilingual staff and appreciating the positive perspective of working in this field. In the UK the range of languages is extensive. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Ukranian, Hong Kong Chinese, Vietnamese Chinese, Creole, Black English, Bengali, Gujerati and Panjabi cover the main ethnolinguistic groups. In the 1987 ILEA language census over 140 languages were recorded as being spoken in London.

During the last years a significant number of papers, books, and monographs devoted to speech and language impairments in bilingual children have been published. Different aspects and questions have been approached and today we have a relatively good understanding of the specific characteristics of the speech and language difficulties potentially observed in bilingual and multilingual children. This interest has been significantly resulted from the potential developmental and educational consequences of bilingualism. Our understanding of the communication disorders in adult populations is notoriously more limited, even though over 50% of the adult population can speak at least another language in addition to his/her native language. That simply means that over 50% of the communication disorders observed in adults are bilingual speech and language disorders: bilingual aphasias, bilingual dementias, bilingual stuttering, etc. This book was written with the specific purpose of filling this gap. The major purpose of this book has been to integrate the state of the art on the different aspects of the communication disorders observed in adult bilinguals. The book is organised in such a way that an integrated perspective of bilingualism is presented: from the normal conditions to the pathology; from the clinical descriptions to the rehabilitation issues; from the biological factors to the cultural variables.

Both SLPs and researchers must understand speech and language developments in children - and SLPs also need reliable assessment and intervention approaches for serving bilingual children with language disorders. This comprehensive text is one of the few to offer readers in-depth theoretical and practical information on these timely topics. brings together more than a dozen top researchers to present developmental data, best assessment practices, and appropriate intervention approaches in the following areas: language processing skills; lexical development; morpho-syntactic development; first language loss; grammatical impairments; semantic development; phonological development and disorders; narrative development and disorders; fluency; language intervention for bilingual speakers. The chapter outlines the major purposes of intervention for bilingual children with speech and language disorders, explores the debate over which language SLPs should use with bilingual children, and examines ways to promote gains in both languages. With this research-based text, SLPs will understand the complexity of language development in bilingual children and learn appropriate assessment and intervention approaches.

Second language learners often produce language forms resembling those of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). At present, professionals working in language assessment and education have only limited diagnostic instruments to distinguish language impaired migrant children from those who will eventually catch up with their monolingual peers. This book presents a comprehensive set of tools for assessing the linguistic abilities of bilingual children. It aims to disentangle effects of bilingualism from those of SLI, making use of both models of bilingualism and models of language impairment. The book’s methods-oriented focus will make it an essential handbook for practitioners who look for measures which could be adapted to a variety of languages in diverse communities, as well as academic researchers.

Society is becoming increasingly multi-lingual and this presents monolingual professionals, particularly those in special education and speech pathology, with severe problems. Is the language delay in a child from a bilingual environment a result of this background or is there a specific speech problem? Is a child’s poor performance in school due to his problems of coping with two languages, or does he need remedial teaching? Originally published in 1984, this book is not concerned with second language learning, but with speech and learning difficulties in bilingual children as they are presented to remedial teachers, psychologists and speech therapists. To this end the first group of specially written articles deals with the patterns of language usage in bilingual communities and the social and psychological factors which shape these patterns; with processes in normal bilingual language acquisition; and with the relationship between cognitive development and growing up with two languages. Management issues and methods involved in helping children with language problems are also tackled: they include taking case histories, family liaison, counselling, bilingual programmes, mother tongue teaching, curriculum development and the training of personnel to work in the bilingual-bicultural field. This book provided a great deal of practical help, in a field that was relatively new at the time of writing, and helped to enlighten readers on the issues involved and assist in crystalising thought and directing future research.