Interacting With Bilingual Children Essay

Bilingual children are categorised as individuals who receive consistent input in two or more languages during the significant point of language and communication development. They can be further separated into two categories: Those who learn two languages simultaneously from birth and those who learn first language (L1) initially at birth and sequentially a second language (L2) at infancy (Kohnert, 2010). Most children who learn multiple languages are typically developing (TD) children, meaning that with robust communicative practices they will develop sufficient skills in the languages used regularly in their environment ( Kohnert, 2010).

There is a common concern in the literature about the most effective way to educate and intervene with bilingual children; this is because they start school with language skills that differ from their monolingual peers and in particularly, sequential bilingual children are at greater risk of being misdiagnosed with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) once they enter the educational system (Bedore & Pena, 2008). In addition, children who present language difficulties are believed to be unsuitable for dual language acquisition. However, this notion does not derive from evidence-base, therefore needs further consideration

Sequential TD bilingual children may appear to have such deficits but only when tested against their monolingual peers (Bedore & Pena, 2008). The focal point here however, is with those bilingual children who fail to make normal development in both languages without any apparent cause of delay. Studies directly investigating bilingual children with SLI are scarce and inadequate in terms of what they add to our understanding of whether bilingualism can negatively influence children with SLI (Paradis, Cargo, Genesee & Rice,