speech delay and bilingual education

Thu Nov 29 01:47:23 UTC 2001

dear all,

first, I want to thank you all for your contributions to my question if one language should be dropped if a child is speech delayed. My friend was very desperate when she asked me for help but all of your contibutions have helped her to come over this crisis and she asked me to forward a mail to you as well:

I want to thank you all very much for your mails. I did'nt expect so much interest, although I know, that there are a lot of children with this problem.
Indeed Your thoughts are very important for me. They help me not only in the discussions with the speach-therapist and teachers. The main thing for me is to know that my son gets the support he needs and that I do the best to help him. Living on a greek island is not easy if you have a problem like we have because there is no choice. We have to be happy that there is a speach-therapist at all!
After all I have to say that my son is doing very well in the therapy and even the therapist admits, that he makes progress in big steps. She stopped critizising, and she says now, that you can see the difference between children, where nobody helps at home and children with support. I take this as a compliment, but I didn't tell her, that I do allmost all exercises in german. 

Again I thank you very much for your interest and your support.
Sincerly 
Petra Scheiblich-Raftopoulos 

And here a summary of the responses:
Several people suggested a hearing test as hearing problems are often the cause of speech delay. I forgot to mention in my earlier mail that the boy had been tested and his hearing was o.k. He will have a thorough evaluation of all of his delays early next year (the waiting lists are long).
1. Anne Kolatsis gave a reference which discusses early bilingual development: Genesee, F. (1989) Early bilingual development: one language or two?, Journal of Child Language, 16, 1, 161-179.

2. Madalena Cruz-Ferreira gave her experiences of raising her trilingual kids and made a very good point: " Just to say that teachers, other adults and peers alike, all of them monolingual, *will* blame multilingualism on whatever problems a child may happen to develop. ... Your friend *will* have a huge problem eventually, when she finds that by switching over to another language she'll have lost precious contact with her child."

3.  Christiane Dietrich wrote: "there is NO evidence that children that are brought up bilingually are more prone to developing speech and language problems and it is highly unlikey to be the cause of your child's problems. Although sometimes parent-child interaction therapy is used as part of the therapy programme when working with children with delay, the reason for this is not that the parent's behaviour is causing the problem but there are sometimes changes that can be made that are beneficial for he child's improvment such as following the child's lead (e.g. frequently commenting on things that the child is already paying attention to)."

4. Susanne Dopke pointed out: "Strategies learned in one language can certainly be transferred to another and that is how the speech pathologist should handle it. Countries who have guidelines for speech pathologists working with culturally and linguistically diverse clients advise exactly that (eg. US, GB, Australia) The only consession I would make to the speech pathologist is that I would enlist the father's or another Greek carer's support to also implement the stratgies into the Greek input on a daily basis. The more helpful input a child with difficulties gets the better, and if a family wants their child to be bilingual that would ideally happen in both languages."

5. Christiane Hofbauer mentioned: "... I had indirectly to do with some children where the parents tried to educate their children monolingually in a foreign, not fluently spoken language. This caused problems in all of the children. So, in my opinion, the mother NEVER should try to speak only Greek with her son, if her Greek is not very good (besides the fact that a restricted communication with a child, which isn't very communicative, shouldn't help at all.)

6. Annick De Houwer advised the mother to NOT give up speaking the language she usually speaks with her child and feels comfortable with as here is absolutely no evidence that shows that this would help; on the contrary, there are many (unpublished, anecdotal, but still!!) reports that when mothers stop talking their usual language to their child in pre-school age, some children get very upset and even stop speaking altogether for a while. This issue (and others) are taken up in her brief article, 'Two or More Languages in Early Childhood: Some General Points and Practical Recommendations', first published in AILA News and since 1999 available through the website of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics at http://www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/earlychild.html .

7. Sharon Armon-Lotem wrote: "There is no research, that I know of, that shows any relations betweeen the two. It is traditionally assumed that bilingualism is good for you if you have no language problems (gives you a cognitive advantage, etc.). One thing is clear. Bilingualism is not a reason for language impairement (which have a yet unknown neurological source), though some say it causes language delay in some children. ... We want to try and see what efffect bilingualism has on language impairment). It will be a few years before we can say something definite. But your friend should trust her own judgement on this issue, though she might have to fight for it."

8. Annabelle David worte: "Stopping to speak one language to a child will certainly not do any good. I have been through many testimony of parents of children in that situation. Most speech therapist are not trained to deal with bilingual children. So the only thing that can go wrong for them is what they don't know about: bilingualism. Your friend really should talk to somebody who knows about bilingualism. Not any other person."

9. Fred Genesee as well stressed that there seems to be a widespread belief among speech and language therapists, not all, that bilingual acquisition poses additional challenges to children with language and other impairments. It is not clear where this belief comes from because, in fact, there is not a lot of evidence on children with language impairment who are raised bilingually.  He goes on saying: "However, the evidence that does exist does not support the recommendation to drop one of the languages. Johanne Paradis, Martha Crago and I have completed a study of French-English bilingual children with SLI (using age-matched and mlu-matched controls; monolingual and bilingual). We found that the impairment of the bilingual children was of the same nature generally as that of monolingual children with SLI and, furthermore, it did not differ in severity from that of monolingual children with SLI. In short, there was no evidence from our study that bilingual exposure altered the nature or severity of these children's impairment. In other words, it did not appear that their exposure to two languages was playing a causal role in their impairment. 
As well, when one looks at the research on normal children who are raised bilingually, there is the clear indication that dual language acquisition is fundamentally the same as monolingual acquisition with the necessary proviso that differences in the learning environments of bilingual children can impact their language acquisition accordingly. Thus, children who have inconsistent or impoverished exposure in one of their two languages are likely to exhibit poorer development in that language than in the other. In other words, the research on normal bilingual acquisition indicates that the language faculty is capable of learning two languages as well as one, other things being equal. This would lead me to believe that language impairment in bilingual children is not likely to be relieved by dropping one of the languages; impaired children are likely to continue to exhibit problems in the remaining language. My reading of the research suggests to me that language impairment is not specific to one or two languages but is fundamental to any and all languages that impaired children learn. 
Of course, it is dangerous and ill-advised to make specific recommendations about indivdual children without detailed information about them and their social environments. Children are all different and the circumstances in which they learn and use their languages is different. The social and personal fallout that comes from using two languages (or only one) must also be considered seriously.  And clearly we have a lot more to learn about bilingual language impairment -- it is probably not a unitary construct and we have only just begun to understand even one form of it. 
As  general rule it seems to me that in order to justify dropping one language in the case of a child who is growing up bilingual there should be well documented evidence of what the language difficulty is and specific expectations about how changing his life by dropping a language will resolve his difficulties. There are attendant problems for children when their lives are altered by simply dropping a language." 

10. Miquel Serra i Raventoswrote: "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 Annick 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 example 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. 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.

11. Mary Kastamoula recommended a general assessment of the child's cognitive and play skills by a good child psychologist and a visit to another speech and language therapist for a second opinion as it seemed to her that there is more than a language delay here. Questions to consider are:
1) Is the language delay part of a general delay or is the delay specific to language skills?
2) The point about checking hearing is very valid and part of a routine when investigating language delay.
3) What is the child's play skills? Are they age appropriate?
4) How is the child communicating with siblings? In which language? What about the father?
She went on saying that she agrees with the suggestion that the mother should use her own language to communicate with the child and not a language she does not possess well. Or otherwise, if the mother cannot control input from greek relatives she should at least use her own language consistently.
She understands what the situation is in a greek island where the specialists and the resources are not always there. It is an issue that there is not a bilingual therapist who could handle the family's bilingual situation and if the therapist is greek then therapy and generalisation unavoidably will be in greek. It would be a good idea for the future that the child is assessed by a bilingual therapist.There are many greek speech and language therapists trained in Germany. In the present case may be the father could be more involved as greek is his language and help witht the exercises so that the mother can feel that she can use german with the child. Whatever they decide in cooperation with their therapist, consistency of the speakers is important so that the child can associate a language with a speaker e.g. mother german, father greek.

12. Elaine Silliman as well stressed the importance of an audiological evaluation as an essential first step. She goes on saying that one would hope that speech-language pathologists would not attribute a language learning problem of this kind to a child's bilingual education. As Fred Genesee points out, if a child has a language impairment, that impairment will be found in both languages that the child speaks, not just one. A major clinical issue, however, is that many of the tools available for diagnostic decision making are based on empirical studies of English speaking children. Thus, an important issue concerns how to analyze the level of language development in children whose languages differ substantially from English morphosyntax. For an excellent discussion of the issues involved in the cross-linguistic clinical analysis of language samples, two recent sources are recommended: 
Gutierrez-Clellen, V. F., Restrepo, M. A., Bedore, L., Pena, E., & Anderson. R. (2000). Language sample analysis in Spanish-speaking children: Methodological considerations. Language, Speech, & Hearing Services in Schools, 31 (1), 88-98.
Leonard, L. B. (1999). The study of language acquisition across languages. In O. L. Taylor & L. B. Leonard (Eds.), Language acquisition across North
America: Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives (pp. 3-18). San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing.

13. Barbara Conboy sent another reference:
Gutierrez-Clellen, V.F. (1999). Language choice in intervention with bilingual children. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 8, 291-302

I hope I didn't forget anybody. Thanks again.

Beate

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