speech delay and bilingual education

[beate luo]

dear all,

my friend, a German living in Greece, is educating her children bilingual. However, her 4 year old son's development is retarded (motor skills as well as cognition and speech) by about one year. He has started logotherapy two months ago. The therapist advised the mother to stop talking German to him as this would negatively influence his development and would actually be the reason for his speech delay. His mother's Greek is not very good and to stop talking to him would influence their communication a lot. She asked me if it would be generally advised against bilingual education in the case of speech delay and if it wouldn't be possible to do the therapy in Greek but the exercises at home in German as she is doing it at the moment. As I am not a specialist in this field, I would like to forward her questions to you.

This boy started to communicate orally only when he was already 2.6. His Greek was understandable only for his family until about September this year. In German he is lagging far behind in pronunciation and grammar but his vocabulary is somewhat bigger than in Greek. His mother told me that her son is not learning by himself and needs a lot of practice. He'd never been asking a lot and seems not to be interested in new things. He used to be very introverted but is now that he is going to kindergarden more open and socially active. There are still a lot of things he should know but still does not. Just a few days ago he learned the difference between day and night. To explain to him the differences between summer and winter has taken his mother several weeks. He as well needed a long time to learn the names of colors. And he can use a word only in the context in which it appeared when he learned it. In another situation the same word has to be learned again. He is not analyzing his speech but learning whole phrases. But his mother said that her impression was that he had no difficulties with the 2 languages as he can easily switch from one to the other and that he knows with whom to speak which language. She as well noticed that he could transfer what he had learned from one language to the other. She therefore is reluctant to give up speaking German to him and has asked for advice. She is experiencing a lot of pressure from the therapist, the kindergardenteachers and others who blame her son's speech delay to the bilingual education - something neither his mother nor I believe is true. As my friends family as well is not very supportive, she is now looking for advice from specialists.

I would very much appreciate any information or reference I could forward to her. Thanks in advance.


Sincerely yours,
Dr. Beate Luo

Feng-Chia University
Foreign Lanuage and Literature Teaching Section
Dept. of Humanities
100 Wen-Hua Rd.
Hsi-Tun District, 407
Taichung City
Taiwan, ROC
e-mail: beate at fcu.edu.tw 


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