Being A Bilingual Child Essay

It has always been difficult for SLPs (Speech Language Pathologist) to diagnose bilingual children. There are several factors that make bilingual children much harder to assess compared to monolingual children. First, the diversity makes it hard to group students together by language spoken because the language used can all be different. A classroom can include a Spanish bilingual, and a Chinese bilingual at the same time. Second, most SLPs are not bilingual. It is especially hard to find SLPs and interpreters for languages with very few speakers in the region. Third, the SLP would likely be a monolingual mainstream English speaker, and the SLP would no be sensitive to bilingual differences and over diagnose bilingual children with SLI.

Bilingual children itself is ambiguous. There is a large variation in bilingualism. One can be bilingual since birth receiving inputs of two or more

First, the SLP has to understand the usage of each language. The SLP needs to consider the settings of which language is used when and where. If English in used in classrooms and Spanish is spoken at home, the vocabulary the child knows might correspond to the language that occurs more frequently. It is important to assess both languages and compare them. A bilingual child can have SLI in either languages, or just one language. Often many SLPs are only able to assess in English, and they can misdiagnose someone with SLI due to the child’s lack of English skills. Bilingual children often have more vocabulary when combined both languages, but lack in vocabulary when compared to monolinguals of one language. Although, bilinguals catch up eventually, it is important to make sure they receive certain help in improving their English skills, since lack of English skills might result in doing poorly in school work. Maximizing the assessment scores for bilinguals on assessments helps the child not to be misdiagnosed as having