So, this is about the 5th time that this question has come up in the last 7 days! And it’s variations of:
- Wouldn’t it be better for a bilingual child with DLD to be in English only?
- But, language is so hard, isn’t bilingualism harder for children with DLD?
- Would we see more progress if we focused only on one language?
The answer to this and other variants of the question is NO!
NO, NO NO NO NO NO!
I don’t think I can say it enough. And what’s infuriating about this is that it’s usually someone who, hasn’t studied bilingualism, or isn’t bilingual (often both), and they can’t just accept that it’s not the way to go. They pose more scenarios (not based on their expertise or the literature, or on much of anything, but on their own intuition).
But, the research is pretty clear. Doing intervention in two languages doesn’t slow down acquisition of English. Bilingual education, doesn’t slow down English language learning. Kids with DLD who are bilingual struggle not because of bilingualism but because of their DLD. Language is hard– one language is hard, two languages are hard. But (and here’s the point) if you NEED two languages to communicate, to connect with the people in your life, you need two languages. And it won’t slow you down any more than DLD will. And it gives you more people to talk to and that’s a good thing.
Research? Yes, Plenty of it!
Here’s a new paper that’s very cool– this was a group of young children with Down syndrome. Researchers looked at the amount of exposure they had to Welsh and English. They found that their English growth was not affected by exposure to Welsh.
Here’s another paper that I was the lead on. We studied just under 600 Spanish-English bilinguals; 100 with DLD at different levels of exposure to English and Spanish. We found that if we looked at kids in their better language (at the individual level) there were no effects of exposure to the other language. This was true for DLD and typical groups. The kids with DLD scored lower on morphosyntax and semantics measures than the typical kids– as expected. But, they did not score lower than their monolingual counterparts with DLD (and just think, they can talk to more people).
In an another paper found here, we tested about 1000 bilingual kids. We looked at how many kids fell into the lowest quartile of performance indicating risk for DLD. Comparing by level of exposure there were no differences by group, so we concluded that bilingualism does not pose an added risk for poor performance (when you test in both languages). In fact the group that had been bilingual the longest had a tiny bit LESS risk. Bilingualism is good for you.
In this paper, researchers found that a monolingual English vocabulary intervention vs. a bilingual (Spanish-English) vocabulary intervention resulted in no posttest differences for English. Though the bilingual vocabulary intervention also supported Spanish.
There are more papers, and many of them are in this blog– look around. But, stop it with this nonsense. Please!
2 Languages 2 Worlds 