Longitudinal Perspectives on Child English Second Language Acquisition

PURPOSE

Research on English second language (ESL) children has tended to focus on academic skills and outcomes, reading in particular, rather than on their development of oral English, even though oral language is the foundation for these academic skills and outcomes. Comprehensive, longitudinal research on the oral English development of minority children is needed to inform educational policy and practices concerning these children, especially with respect to special-needs assessment and programming, approaches to literacy instruction, and evaluation of academic achievements.  The need is pressing since Statistics Canada has shown that the number and diversity of ESL children from minority first language backgrounds has increased from the 2001 to the 2006 census. This research program consists of two integrated longitudinal studies of ESL children designed to address the following questions: (1) How long does it take for ESL children to become similar to their native speaker peers? (2) How do typically-developing ESL children compare to ESL children with language learning disabilities over time? (3) How do factors such as, language experiences outside the classroom, maternal education, language learning aptitude and characteristics of the first language, influence individual children’s acquisition of English? (4) How does the first language develop over time when the second language is the majority language of the community?

METHOD

The main study is following 20 ESL children, 7 year olds with 3 years of exposure to English in school, for at least three years or until the end of elementary school. Children have either Mandarin or Cantonese as their first language. Standardized tests covering receptive and expressive vocabulary, grammatical abilities and story telling are being used in order to facilitate comparison with native-speaker norms. Experimenter-made tests designed to investigate whether children’s first language displays signs of incomplete acquisition and/or crosslinguistic interference from English are included.  The story telling task from the main study is also given in the Chinese languages, and a comparable scoring scheme has been developed, in order to compare aspects of story quality, diversity of vocabulary, and sentence length and structure across children’s two languages over time. Additional measures to obtain information on sources of individual differences are being given, e.g., parental questionnaires. The secondary study is following 10 ESL children with a language learning disability (specific language impairment) and 10 ESL peers  with typical development, matched for age and exposure to English and first language background, also for three years. The same English-language measures and questionnaires from the main study are being used in the secondary study.

OUTCOMES

The outcomes of this research will make contributions to theoretical issues concerning whether ESL children ever become indistinguishable from their native-speaker peers, whether it is possible for children with language learning disabilities to acquire a second language, and what combination of factors best explains success or limitations in ESL children’s acquisition of both their languages. The outcomes will also provide descriptive information on the oral language developmental trajectories and outcomes of minority children that is much-needed in the educational domain.

Developing Resources for Language Assessment with ESL Children

PURPOSE

Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) are increasingly finding children whose first language is not English in their caseloads, and yet the assessment protocols they were trained to use were developed for monolingual populations. Children aged 0-9 whose mother tongue is neither English nor French number 432,655, approximately 12.5% of all Canadian children in this age range. The over- and under-identification of language impairment in children who are learning English as a second language (ESL) is a documented risk factor, and occurs because (1) there is an absence of appropriate assessment tools available for this population, and (2) there is overlap in the linguistic characteristics between the incompletely-learned English of typically-developing (TD) ESL children and that of monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment (LI). To reduce the incidence of over- and under-identification, SLPs need more detailed information about the characteristics of typical and atypical ESL development, and access to assessment resources based on the linguistic performance of ESL children. The objective of this research is to provide both SLPs and the academic community with such information and resources.

METHOD

The research questions for this program are as follows: (1) What are the linguistic characteristics that distinguish TD ESL children from ESL children with LI? (2) How can TD ESL children be expected to perform on English standardized tests normed with monolinguals the same age? (3) Does ESL children’s performance compared with monolingual age-mates differ depending on the linguistic skill being measured? (4) What standardized and non-standardized measures might be effective for discriminating between TD ESL children and ESL children with LI? (5) How might ESL children’s performance on language measures change as a function of age of onset of English, exposure time to English, first language background, and other variables such as parental levels of education or amount of English spoken in the home?

218 TD ESL children and 28 ESL children with LI, ranging in age from 5;0-6;11 and in exposure to English from 1-3 years, participated in this study. Children’s first languages were Spanish/Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese), Punjabi/Hindi/Urdu, or Arabic. Data collection included parental questionnaires about children's language development history and current language environment, naturalistic language sampling, as well as English standardized tests designed to measure phonological working memory skills, vocabulary accumulated in English, accuracy with verbs (grammar) and narrative skills.

OUTCOMES

The primary practical outcome is the Child English Second Language Centre: http://www.linguistics.ualberta.ca/CHESL_Centre.aspx. This website is comprised of resources to assist clinicians and educators in assessing the language development of ESL children.  Knowledge-based outcomes consist of articles in scholarly journals and book chapters. These are available for downloading in the Publications section of this website