Children speak child-speak

               
            Me: Children speak child-speak, you know?

            Possibly you: Duh!?

            Possibly you: Of course they do!

            Possibly you: Hellooo (singsong), they’re *children*... (ditto)

            etc.

If your reaction to the title of this post matches one of these (possible) responses to it, I’m with you all the way. But do read on, by all means. I’m not going to tell you that children speak child-speak, I’m going to tell you about those of us who appear to believe that children don’t. And I won’t be telling you only about your average, averagely misinformed layperson, either.

The first time I realised that something must be very wrong with academic treatments of child multilingualism was back in the 1980s, when the literature about “translation equivalents” was making headlines. Briefly, proponents of multilingual equivalence had it that children being raised multilingually should either provide evidence that they had acquired words for the same things in all of their languages, or forfeit their right to be (called) multilingual. Being multilingual was then viewed as being what I call multi-monolingual: multilingual children are just like monolingual children, only several times over. Implicitly, the claim was that multilingual adults must also be multi-monolingual, on the understanding that children don’t typically remain children all their lives.

If you’re shaking your head in benevolent disbelief at how this kind of nonsense could ever have made headlines, then don’t. Not just because nonsense about multilingualism keeps making headlines, but principally because this claim appears to have resurfaced lately: one announcement of a meeting on multilingualism, dating from only a few weeks ago, states that “early bilingualism often result[s] in perfect parallel proficiency”. Note: perfect, parallel, proficiency. I doubt it that the convenors’ choice of words was a simple tribute to alliteration. But I do wonder what these words mean, in isolation and in collocation, and I would love to know about the evidence supporting this statement.

My first publication explaining that perfect parallel translation equivalence proficiency can’t make multilingual sense also explained why. The data came from my own children, then only two of them, and then users of only Portuguese and Swedish. At the one-word stage, the children started using the “wrong” language with us, parents. Or rather, they started using the same language with both parents, in words like, for example, Swedish där (‘there’) or Portuguese dá (‘gimme’), and I wanted to know why.

On preliminary inspection, the observation was that “translation equivalents” of these words in their other language were way beyond babies’ articulatory abilities, e.g. Portuguese ali or Swedish får jag. I concluded that the children’s “vocal tracts were, at the time, not mature enough to pronounce the respective translations in each language, which are phonologically more elaborate.” Child speech doesn’t reflect adult articulatory sophistication.

On closer inspection, the children turned out to use different intonations with each of the words that they so “mixed”. In fact, they used different prosodies altogether with each parent, and they did so in their babbling. I understood their use of prosody as a means of differentiating between the otherwise very similar syllables/words that they were able to pronounce, like Swedish där or Portuguese dá. The children were signalling, through intonation, rhythm, and stress, that they were speaking different languages, and that they were doing so with the “right” parent. So I wondered: should we also look for “equivalents” of intonation across languages, as evidence of “perfect parallel proficiency”? Where can we find such equivalents? And if we can’t find them (we can’t), does this mean that multilingual children who do this (my children are not the only ones) are not multilingual after all, and are instead “confused”, because they’re using the “wrong/right” words with the “right/wrong” parent?

We may want to rethink what we mean when we talk about using “words”, and we may want to rethink what being multilingual means. It’s not the children’s fault that adult expectations shape the way we see and hear our little ones. My children were using both of their languages, and they were differentiating their use of both. Not by replicating adult uses of these languages, not in ways that adults believe languages “should” be used, and not in baby ways of doing adult things: they were doing baby things the baby way. If you’re keen to read a detailed account of (all three) children’s strategies to sort out their (three) languages, have a look in my book Three is a Crowd?

In contrast to many adults, small children do and say things that make sense. What they do and say teaches us about how we all learn, including how we learn to be multilingual, and teaches us how to give evidence of what we’ve learned: by using the means that are available to us. If, that is, we choose to *see* what’s going on, instead of attempting to fence in facts within the theory of the day.

OK, so untrained vocal tracts explain child mixes, and productions which don’t match uses of language in the children’s surroundings. Could this also be the case for adult language learners? My next post has something to say about this.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1990). Karin and Sofia in Bilingual-Land In J. Leather & A. James (Eds.), New Sounds 90. Proceedings of the 1990 Amsterdam Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (pp. 248-254). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Shibboleths & Co. Saturday 6^th April 2013.

Glitches, false starts, and dead ends

Languages don’t come in ready-to-use packages. Their use is what makes them, because languages don’t exist without users. Languages are not “gifts”, either. Their acquisition takes time and commitment even when, as tiny infants, we don’t know we’re spending time or honouring commitments.

Language acquisition is a process, one which never ends, in fact. All of us are still learning all of our languages, because languages themselves are processes, as Wilhelm von Humboldt reminded us two centuries ago: Sie selbst [die Sprache] ist kein Werk (Ergon), sondern eine Thätigkeit (Energeia). We say that languages are “transmitted” from parent to child by force of habit, like we say that the sun “rises” and “sets”. Languages don’t (re)emerge unscathed by human interference across generations, for two reasons: they don’t have a life of their own, and we aren’t neutral conveyors of anything that we “pass on”.

We do end up using our languages like somebody else, for the simple reason that all of us, young or old, learn somebody else’s languages, from somebody else. But we do this our way. When we learn, we change, both ourselves and what we learned: just like there are no languages without users, there is no learning without learners. Our children don’t imitate us. If they did, they wouldn’t say gween for “green” or call every grown-up male in sight “daddy”, and our languages would be, today, exactly like they were ever since we started calling them “languages”. Child uses of language, whether monolingual or multilingual, don’t follow a script, because languages aren’t scripts.

Our children are not being “taught” our languages either, they are learning their own. Acquiring things means making them ours. When we acquire languages, we need to adapt to them and adapt them to us, whether our purpose is to ask to have a nappy changed, or provide a referee report for an academic paper. The interesting thing is that we can’t learn to do any of these things without, well, doing them. The trick is in the doing.

I like to think that we’re doing something new whenever we’re doing something. This is what fascinates me, for example, about the theatre and other live performances. I know there must have been rehearsals, I know there’s some kind of script, and I know the performers are trained professionals. But then, aren’t we all, when it comes to using our languages? I like to think that our uses of language are as unique as any other live performances – and I like to think that any glitches, false starts, and dead ends are part of the performance. The Roman “circenses” wouldn’t have had half the appeal they enjoyed if everyone knew exactly what was going to happen.

We may have been brainwashed into thinking that language acquisition in home environments is glitch-free, because we’ve been brainwashed into believing that “later” language acquisition is, by definition, glitch-full, but the facts are that any language acquisition will have glitches, false starts and dead ends. We say ser for estar in Portuguese, and tycka for tro in Swedish, or vice versa, and we say fink for think and think for sink in English, to mention but these acquisitional goodies in each of these languages. We speak like mummy when we might want to speak like daddy, or vice versa. We stutter and stammer, and fall silent in search of missing words or in bafflement at just-uttered bits and pieces of language that we suddenly realise we have no idea how to parse. We finish thoughts that we haven’t started, and we hit linguistic walls when we should be finishing the thoughts that we did start. And we do this most of the time.

Whoever believes that we all speak in what linguists call “words” and “sentences” has never bothered to listen to real-life speech (whoever believes that we *should* speak in words and sentences probably also believes that words and sentences are real-life beings). Glitches, false starts, and dead ends aren’t evidence of faulty language learning, they’re part of the learning process. They’re evidence that we’re using our new linguistic tools for what we need to say and do with them. Again, whether we’re young or old. Again, whether we’re monolingual or multilingual.

Next time, I’ll go back to small children, and to what they teach us about the way they learn.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Children speak child-speak. Saturday 23^rd March 2013.

“Teaching” children

Many of us seem to have come to associate teaching with the kind of structured teaching that we also associate with schooling. We need set times and places in order to be taught things, we need set syllabuses, preferably with statements about things like teaching purposes, and we need details about things like learning outcomes, preferably complete with a battery of tests which make sure that the learner fits both purposes and outcomes, through the application of things like bell-shaped curves and normal distributions. And, of course, we need teachers.

Many of us also associate teaching children with this kind of teaching. Regular questions that I get from parents in multilingual families reflect these twin beliefs. They want to teach their language(s) to their children, and they wonder about hiring people to do so, about timetables, (online) books and exercise books, and about must-dos and must-not-dos like, you’ve guessed it, accidentally flouting the OPOLicy. Some parents are adamant that teaching languages means teaching their grammar. This isn’t easy, because learning things is never easy, they concede, but it must be taught anyway “because children need to learn something”. Many of us, it also became clear to me from similar correspondence, thus associate learning with laborious no-pain-no-gain kinds of processes.

There are several issues here. First, the assumption that learners can’t learn by themselves. The teaching philosophy behind structured teaching is that learning means being aware that you’re learning, failing which you’re unable to learn at all. Structured teaching is but one kind of teaching, of course. Perhaps not the most effective, either, precisely because it takes learning as dependent on (adult-bound) structured prompting. Second, the assumptions that if you teach little Jenny biology, then little Jenny will have learned biology; and that if Jenny has learned biology, then Jenny must have had biology taught to her. We can, of course, learn without dedicated teaching, just like, alas!, all of us teachers are familiar with dedicated teaching without learning – if you’re into teaching linguistics, have a look at those Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know. Not to mention all those bits and pieces of “hidden curriculum” that we do teach, though unwittingly. One of my students once told me that he had learned two things from my linguistics courses: linguistics, which I knew I was teaching, and my way of teaching linguistics, which I didn’t know I was teaching. And third, the assumption that learning carries effort, which is the point I wish to expand on.

Image © Clipart from clipartheaven.com

Children learn best when they’re not being taught. Do keep in mind that we’re talking children here, often toddlers, so let me rephrase that: children learn best when they’re not being taught in the ways that we adults think that things should be taught. Take, for example, what some adults perceive as “doing nothing”, as when children are mumbling away to themselves in some remote corner of the house, or staring in silence at the moon. To me, respecting the brain activity which must be going on there and then is a brainy activity in itself. Or take play, which many parents view as a waste of precious childhood time and/or as irrelevant to learning. “Idle” people strike us as no-good layabouts, including where they may be, simply, thinking – which is something that a lot of us may well have forgotten how to do, since we’re all so busy engaging in “real”, tangible activities, in order to avoid being seen as no-good layabouts.

Predictably, then, “idle” children strike us as prospective no-gooders. This is why we enrol the tiny things in assorted “schools”, to “teach” them to become proper adults like us – and this is why I have scare quotes in the title of this post. We believe that babies in nappies should be taught to sit still, obey instructions, listen to adults, do things on schedule, say things on cue. We believe that children should learn about their new world like so many of us learn about new countries, by following the hoisted flag of the standard tourist guide. We believe, in short, that children should not be children, in an intriguing revival of Victorian ways of looking at childhood.

Jean Piaget’s take on matters of teaching children makes a lot more sense to me: “When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.” If the “his/himself” in this English version of the quotation irks you, by the way, it does me, too. Piaget’s original words are: “Tout ce qu’on apprend à l’enfant, on l’empêche de l’inventer ou de le découvrir.”

This is all the more true of languages, for two reasons. One, that children, like the rest of us, learn best by doing. We may not know that we’re teaching language, without scare quotes, when we’re talking about something else in that language, but we are. As I wrote in an article about child language acquisition, “language learning is going on whenever language is used around children.” The other reason is that learning languages has much more to it than following the guide. In my book Multilinguals are ...?, I noted that “the best language lessons are the ones that don’t target the languages themselves at all” (p. 72).

Structured teaching deliberately steers attention away from what we want to learn, whether we’re children or adults, to what someone else has decided we should be learning. No wonder our learning of languages, whether we’re children or adults, is often fraught with stumbling blocks. The next post has some more to say about this.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Glitches, false starts, and dead ends. Saturday 9^th March 2013.

Speech-language clinics: cultural meeting places?

When our children are referred to speech-language services, the least of our concerns is probably to muse on whether the clinic is a suitable venue for cultural happenings. We go there to seek expert assistance, that’s all. Expertise, however, isn’t absolute, because experts aren’t abstract beings. Like the rest of us, they’re shaped by cultural backgrounds and professional training which are bound to specific places and specific times.

Clinical observations leading to diagnoses start at the clinic’s door: Does the child greet new people, and show appropriate curiosity about new surroundings? Does the child say please or thank you, which speakers of languages with words for please and thank you take as a sure sign of basic politeness? Is there telltale body language? How about body contact? If the child shuns an open, extended, unfamiliar hand, or recoils at that hand patting cheeks or ruffling hair, is this culturally odd? What if the same hand insists on heaping dolls, teddy bears and other lifeless representations of living beings near a child who’s scared witless of these things because they’re associated with taboo meanings?

We may all know, in theory, that the same behaviour can be interpreted in widely different ways, but we may not realise that “invisible” cultural considerations, those that we take for granted because they shape our routines, impact clinical observation and assessment: is avoidance of eye contact, for example, a sign of social impairment or of deference? What about silence? The verdict rests with the clinician. The excellent news about this is the growing awareness, among speech-language clinicians, of cultural considerations concerning their little multilingual clients.

Many speech-language clinicians are trained to use a single language of intervention, and receive no training in matters of multilingualism and multiculturalism. There may be no shared language between clinician and client, for example, or no shared ways of using it. One common practice is to ask the parents to interpret, or hire an ad hoc interpreter. A previous post explains why the former solution cannot work, and other research explains what is involved in proper training of clinical interpreters, who aren’t simple, “neutral” vehicles of messages in different languages. See, for example, Claudia V. Angelelli’s book Medical Interpreting and Cross-cultural Communication.

There may also be a shared language, though no normed assessment instruments for other languages used by child clients. Translation comes to mind, here, too: speech-language clinicians do report that they themselves translate and/or adapt instruments which were normed for other languages. But doing so in fact invalidates the standardisation of these tests, making them unusable. Rhea Paul and Courtenay Norbury’s book, Language Disorders from Infancy through Adolescence provides a thorough review of these issues. Elizabeth D. Peña, in an article titled ‘Lost in translation: methodological considerations in cross-cultural research’, raises an additional issue. Neither the instruments were devised to be translated, nor what is in question is the accuracy of a translation: translated tests yield “different patterns of response” in different languages, which “may be due to differences in cultural interpretation” (p. 1257).

We can’t translate languages without translating cultural practices, in other words, because languages are there to serve them. Margaret Friend and Melanie Keplinger, in a study on ‘Reliability and validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT)’, discuss their adaptation of a vocabulary test from (American) English to (Mexican) Spanish, which they used to assess Mexican infants. The task required the children to grasp an object, when prompted with the word for that object. All children failed this task, arousing suspicion of language delay, compared to their American peers. The cause of the failure, as it turned out, was not language, but culture. When questioned about possible reasons for their children’s results, the Mexican parents clarified that they forbid their children to touch things that do not belong to them.

Other recent research reports on growing awareness of cultural issues arising in speech-language clinics. From Australia, in ‘Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children’, Cori Williams and Sharynne McLeod found that clinicians actively sought information about their clients’ languages and cultural backgrounds, faced with a lack of culturally appropriate tools which would do justice to them. Lack of culturally appropriate resources for assessment and intervention is also the case in the US, as Mark Guiberson and Jenny Atkins discuss in ‘Speech-language pathologists’ preparation, practices, and perspectives on serving culturally and linguistically diverse children’. Finally, in a review of clinical practices in multilingual settings worldwide, ‘Towards evidence-based practice in language intervention for bilingual children’, Elin Thordardottir observes that “Existing clinical methods have largely been developed within Western middle-class cultures” (p. 532). In multilingual settings, clinicians are not only being required to interpret what they’re unfamiliar with but, perhaps as crucially, they’re realising that they must stop mistaking what they’re familiar with for “norms”.

Several of my own contributions to this issue focus on monocultural and monolingual features of clinical approaches to speech and language. One book chapter titled ‘Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children’ discusses clinical practices which take culturally-bound ‘mono’ tenets as default behaviour. Another chapter, ‘Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics’, in my book Multilingual Norms, reports on the consequences of monolingual training on the practices of multilingual clinicians.

The next post will have some more to say about small children and their well-being, namely, what does it mean to “teach” children?

Friend, M., & Keplinger, M. (2008). Reliability and validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT): data from American English and Mexican Spanish infants. Journal of Child Language, 35 (01). DOI: 10.1017/S0305000907008264

Guiberson, M., & Atkins, J. (2010). Speech-Language Pathologists’ Preparation, Practices, and Perspectives on Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 33 (3), 169-180. DOI: 10.1177/1525740110384132

Peña, E. (2007). Lost in Translation: Methodological Considerations in Cross-Cultural Research. Child Development, 78 (4), 1255-1264. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01064.x

Thordardottir, E. (2010). Towards evidence-based practice in language intervention for bilingual children. Journal of Communication Disorders, 43 (6), 523-537. DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2010.06.001

Williams, C., & McLeod, S. (2012). Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14 (3), 292-305. DOI: 10.3109/17549507.2011.636071


© MCF 2013

Next post: “Teaching” children. Saturday 23^rd February 2013.

Language dominance: A one-way street with oncoming traffic=Guest post=

by Brian A. Goldstein

“I live on a one-way street that’s also a dead end. I’m not sure how I got there.”

(Steven Wright)

At the recent 2012 convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, I attended many talks focusing on multilingual speakers. Overall, the presentations were of high quality, and I learned a great deal. I noticed, however, that many of the presenters mentioned, and sometimes measured, the children’s language “dominance.”

Yes, I purposely put that word in quotes. Although “dominance” is an intuitively pleasing word/notion, it is ultimately unsatisfying. I am not sure the word “dominant” is an appropriate one to use because, as a unit of measure, it neither describes nor explains. It puts us down a one-way road on which there is oncoming traffic and that is a road we don’t want to travel. To continue the metaphor, the oncoming traffic is the non-“dominant” language. That is, when we aim our headlights at the “dominant” language, then that is the only language that gets the attention. The “other” language ends up in our blind spot, and thus, we might focus only on the one language that is considered “dominant.” Such blinded attention serves to view the bilingual as two monolinguals in one, a notion against which Grosjean (e.g. 1989) has repeatedly, vigorously, and convincingly argued.

“Dominance” is suspect for a variety of reasons, some of which were addressed in this blog before. First, there is not a singular definition. It has been used to describe proficiency, age of acquisition, range of levels, functional strength, scores on standardized tests, etc. (Butler and Hakuta, 2006). Second, it is notoriously difficult to measure (Valdés and Figueroa, 1994). For example, to even attempt to measure it, Valdés and Figueroa indicate that the examiner must measure performance in each of the two languages across tasks, contexts, settings, modalities, and functions and then compare the individual’s total performance for each language. This set of tasks necessitates parallel and equivalent instruments in the two languages. Needless to say, few of these types of instruments exist. Finally, such tests of dominance have been criticized roundly for their relatively poor psychometric properties (e.g. MacSwan, 2005, see item 112 in the Contents; MacSwan and Rolstad, 2006; Mahoney and MacSwan, 2005). Example criticisms include:

• lack of a theoretical foundation
• weak validity and reliability
• lack of adequate operational definitions or norms
• use of arbitrary cut-off scores
• assuming “dominance” is stable over time
• poor classification rates

The result of such relatively poor psychometrics properties is an over-representation of bi-/multilinguals in special education programs, which renders these tests, “...at best arbitrary, at worst, dangerous” (Shuy 1978, p. 376).

These concerns provide the backdrop in terms of one of my apprehensions about language “dominance”. I am concerned that once, and if, “dominance” is determined, it will never be re-evaluated, especially for multilingual children who have communication disorders and are enrolled in intervention. That is, once the child is determined to be “dominant” in Language A, she will always be seen as “dominant” in Language A. Language B will not be merely the road less taken but will be the road never taken (my deepest apologies to Robert Frost). Children’s language skills change significantly over time, especially for multilingual children whose input and output vary based on a host of factors including age, community, parents, siblings, educational status, etc. (e.g. Rojas and Iglesias 2013).

Thus, “dominance,” even if it is psychologically responsible (Menn, 1992), is a moving target in the same way that one adjusts their driving based on the type of road, driving conditions, and make of car. We would be better off examining, and re-examining, multilingual children’s language use (i.e. how often they use each language) and language proficiency (i.e. how well they use each language). By better off, I mean examining constructs that are reliable and valid and aid us in understanding the variables that impinge on language acquisition in multilingual children. As Valdés and Figueroa (1994, pp. 66-67) said, “[m]easuring bilingual ability and bilingual proficiency is both complex and problematic...the best we can do is use a series of measures that together might provide guidance for describing an individual as more like or unlike other bilingual individuals...”

Furthermore, examining language skills in multilinguals needs to be specific to each language domain (i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, and pragmatics). That is, an omnibus notion of “dominance” is equivocal at best and simply does not seem to be supported by the available evidence, at worst, as I have alluded to in a previous post. For example, Ball, Müller, and Munro (2001) examined the production of the trill /r/ in 44 Welsh-dominant and 39 English-dominant children aged 2;6-5;0. They found that production of the trill /r/ differed depending on language “dominance” (quotes mine). Welsh-dominant children acquired the trill earlier than English-dominant peers.

There are other studies that indicate that “dominance” is not a critical factor in accounting for language skills (phonological, in this case). Law and So (2006) examined 100 Cantonese- and Putonghua-speaking bilingual children, aged 2;6-4;11. The children were grouped as either “Cantonese dominant” or “Putonghua dominant” (again, quotes are mine). They found that irrespective of language dominance, Cantonese phonology was acquired earlier than Putonghua phonology. Such equivocal results indicate that labeling a child as “dominant in English” or “dominant in Amharic” simply does not seem warranted as it neither describes nor explains. Finally, Paradis (2001) examined syllable omissions in French-English bilingual 2-year-olds. In 4-syllable target words, English-dominant bilinguals preserved higher frequency of 2nd syllables than did French-dominant bilinguals, but French-dominant bilinguals preserved a higher frequency of 3rd syllables than did English-dominant bilinguals.

Going forward, the picture might even be more complicated than this. Take phonology, for example, a multilingual child could have a superior ability in producing long words in Language A compared to Language B but superior ability in producing complex syllables in Language B than in Language A. If that is the case, then in what language is the child “dominant?” The point is that even defining “dominance” is more complicated than it seems. What is seemingly intuitive is actually quite difficult and nuanced. I am suggesting that we need to examine the child’s skills across each domain in all of their languages and relate those outcomes to their language use and language proficiency. That way, regardless of the car you drive, you will not be traveling down a one-way street with oncoming traffic. Just remember:

“Understanding is a two-way street.”

(Eleanor Roosevelt)

 

Brian A. Goldstein is Dean of the School of Nursing and Health Sciences and Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Ball, M., Müller, N., & Munro, S. (2001). The acquisition of the Rhotic Consonants by Welsh-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 5 (1), 71-86. DOI: 10.1177/13670069010050010401 

Grosjean F (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and language, 36 (1), 3-15. PMID: 2465057

Law, N., & So, L. (2006). The relationship of phonological development and language dominance in bilingual Cantonese-Putonghua children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 10 (4), 405-427. DOI: 10.1177/13670069060100040201

MacSwan, J. (2005). The “Non-Non” crisis and academic bias in native language assessment of language minorities. In J. Cohen, K. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J. MacSwan (Eds.), ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 1415-1422). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 

MACSWAN, J., & ROLSTAD, K. (2006). How Language Proficiency Tests Mislead Us About Ability: Implications for English Language Learner Placement in Special Education. Teachers College Record, 108 (11), 2304-2328. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00783.x

Mahoney, K., & MacSwan, J. (2005). Reexamining Identification and Reclassification of English Language Learners: A Critical Discussion of Select State Practices. Bilingual Research Journal, 29 (1), 31-42. DOI: 10.1080/15235882.2005.10162822

Menn, L. (1992). Building our own models: Child phonology comes of age. In C.A. Ferguson, L. Menn, & C. Stoel-Gammon (Eds.), Phonological development: Model, research, implications (pp. 3-15).Timonium, MD: York Press. 

Paradis, J. (2001). Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems? International Journal of Bilingualism, 5 (1), 19-38. DOI: 10.1177/13670069010050010201

Rojas, R., & Iglesias, A. (2013). The Language Growth of Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners. Child Development, 84 (2), 630-646. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01871.x

Shuy, R. (1978). Problems in assessing language ability in bilingual education programs. In H. La Fontaine et al. (eds.), Bilingual Education. (pp. 376-381). Wayne, NJ: Avery Publishing.

© Brian A. Goldstein 2013

Next post: Speech-language clinics: cultural meeting places? Saturday 9^th February 2013.