speech delay and bilingual education

[Miquel Serra]

Beate,

although here in Catalunya the bilingual situation is quite peculiar
(spanish and catalan are two roman languages that share many basic
sintactic rules and also the culture) we have a very long experience
with SLI children, and other patologies, in this situation (spanish as
family language, school in catalan; TV, garden and street languages
depending on the area) and I suscribe absolutely what Annik and Fred
have said.
My comments do not mean that the communication and language habilities
(an other as Fred suggests) of this child should not be well planned in
case they will remain in Greece: for exemple working mainly in Greek
comprehension and very little in German production, and working it in
function of learning "language" (not German): For exemple, omissions of
weak initial syllables, articles, prepositions and pronouns, if not
major categories that for sure he is still not mastering.
According to my experience and data I would suggest to work more in this
error types than in any other. I can send some drafts or papers, not
about bilingualism, but obtained in bilingual children that finally we
decided to treat as monolingual for research purposes, attending only at
language problems (in both languages) and not as errors of one or
another, wich in terms of psycholinguistic processing are not valuable.
In this case, as in other, it is more important to communicate a lot and
in the most clear and tunned but challenging way to the child than do it
in one or an other language

Miquel.

--
Miquel Serra i Raventos
Catedratic del Departament de Psicologia Basica
Divisio de Ciencies de la Salut, UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
P. de la Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Spain
Tel.  +34 (93) 3125136, Fax.  +34 (93) 402 13 63