Vocabulary Gains in Bilingual Narrative Intervention

Vocabulary Instruction Embedded in Narrative Intervention: A Repeated Acquisition Design Study With First Graders at Risk of Language-Based Reading Difficulty

PURPOSE

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effect of vocabulary instruction embedded in the narrative intervention on the immediate and retained definitional knowledge of taught words for first graders at risk for language-related reading difficulties.

METHOD

We employed a repeated acquisition design with innovative quality features and supplemental statistics with 11 treatment students and three control students. In the context of the school's multitiered system of supports, treatment students received 30-min small group interventions, 4 days a week for 12 weeks. Intervention involved story retelling and personal story generation lessons, both of which emphasized the learning and practicing of target vocabulary words in each story. Pre- and postprobes of the taught definitions were conducted every week.

RESULTS

According to visual analysis conventions of single-case research, there was a consistent pattern of improvement from pre- to postprobes for all treatment participants, but for none of the control participants. Retention was also consistently observed, when measured at Week 13. Supplemental statistics confirmed that large effects were associated with the intervention.

CONCLUSION

Vocabulary instruction embedded in narrative intervention led to meaningful acquisition and retention of taught vocabulary for students at risk of language-based reading difficulty.

Evaluating the Efficacy of a Narrative Language Intervention for Bilingual Students

PURPOSE

This study examines the narrative language and reading outcomes of monolingual and bilingual students who received instruction with the Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL) program, a narrative language intervention.

METHOD

The main effects of the SKILL program were evaluated in a randomized controlled trial in which students (N = 355) who were at risk for English language and literacy difficulties were randomized to the SKILL intervention or a business-as-usual instruction. This article reports secondary analyses examining the efficacy of SKILL for bilingual (n = 148) and monolingual (n = 207) students who completed measures of oral and written narrative language and reading comprehension in English.

RESULTS

Moderation results showed that the effects of SKILL did not differ for monolinguals and bilinguals across most narrative language measures and did not vary for monolinguals or bilinguals based on their pre-intervention language performance.

CONCLUSION

These findings that suggest a language-based approach to improving narrative production and comprehension yielded similar results for monolinguals and bilinguals and that neither monolinguals nor bilinguals in this study needed to meet a certain threshold of English language proficiency to benefit from the intervention.

Effect of a Group-Based Narrative Language Training in Typically Developing Turkish-Dutch Children

INTRODUCTION

Due to the heterogeneity in language trajectories and differences in language exposure, a lot of bilingual children could use some extra support for the acquisition of the school language to reduce the risk of language problems and learning difficulties. Enhancing bilingual children's narrative abilities in the school language could be an efficient approach to advance the general school language abilities as well. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether a narrative intervention could improve both general and narrative school language abilities of typically developing bilingual (Turkish-Dutch) children.

METHODS

Nineteen Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (6-9.9 years) were enrolled in this single-arm early efficacy study. The intervention procedure was administered in the school language (Dutch) and based on a test-teach-retest principle with two baseline measurements. At baseline 1, the expressive, receptive, and narrative language abilities were determined. The second baseline measurement consisted of a second measurement of the narrative abilities. Subsequently, a weekly 1-h group-based intervention was implemented during 10 sessions. After the intervention phase, the expressive, receptive, and narrative language abilities were tested again.

RESULTS

After the intervention, the children produced significantly more story structure elements compared to both baseline measurements. No significant differences were found for microstructure narrative measures. The participants had significantly higher scores on the expressive and receptive language measurements post-intervention.

CONCLUSION

These findings suggest that the intervention could be an efficient approach to stimulate the second language development of bilingual children.

Teaching foreign language grammar to primary-school children with developmental language disorder: A classroom-based intervention study

INTRODUCTION

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) start learning foreign languages, usually English as a foreign language (EFL), at an increasingly young age. However, current scholarship lacks crucial insights into how children with DLD respond to language learning in classroom settings and how they can be supported in doing so. The purpose of this early efficacy study is to determine whether a business-as-usual curriculum or a new teaching method tailored to the specific needs of pupils with DLD results in (greater) progress in the foreign language (English) and in the school language (Dutch).

METHOD

The participants were 75 pupils with DLD in the last three years of primary school, learning EFL in special education in the Netherlands. The intervention group (n=41) received 12 lessons following the CodeTaal approach, including metalinguistic instruction of grammar rules, explicit cross-linguistic contrasts and multimodal interaction with the material. The control group (n=34) received their regular English lessons. The study used a pre- to post-test design and compared the performance of the two groups on a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) in English and a narrative task in both English and Dutch.

RESULTS

Only the intervention group significantly improved in their ability to identify ungrammaticalities in English and generalised the learnt rules to new sentences. Although the performance on the GJT predicted accuracy of English narratives, neither group showed a significant decrease of error rates in English. In contrast, the accuracy of Dutch narratives showed improvement, but only in the intervention group. However, the effects were small and there was significant variability in responsiveness to the intervention.

CONCLUSION

We conclude that pupils with DLD are able to make progress in foreign language learning in a classroom setting if provided with adequate support.

Profiling Bilingual Children: Using Monolingual Assessment to Inform Diagnosis

PURPOSE

Diagnostic tools developed for monolinguals are frequently used for bilingual linguistic assessment. The absence of evaluation criteria for using monolingual norms for bilinguals contributes to inconsistent diagnostic procedures, impacting research and clinical practice. This study considers the reliance on monolingual tools to assess the heritage language to identify bilingual atypical language development (ALD) even when bilingual norms are available for the societal language.

METHOD

One hundred thirty-one English-Hebrew bilingual children aged 5;6-5;11 (years;months) were assessed using diagnostic tools. Bilingual standards are available for the societal language but not for the heritage language. Fifteen English-Hebrew bilingual children were suspected of ALD. They were individually compared with 116 typically developing bilingual peers. The Core Language Score and seven subtest standardized scores of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool-Second Edition were analyzed in the heritage language, English.

RESULTS

Results revealed that a composite score used for differential diagnosis in monolingual children cannot be relied upon for bilingual children. Measurements vary in their diagnostic accuracy, with Concepts and Following Directions (comprehension of instructions), Receptive and Expressive Word Classes (lexicon), and Sentence Repetition (syntax) being the most promising for identifying ALD in bilingual children. Lastly, bilingual children's age of onset of bilingualism must be considered in the analysis of linguistic outcomes.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings elucidate that monolingual assessments for heritage speakers must consider bilingual models of development to ensure a reliable and informative diagnosis. Interacting factors, such as reliance on language-specific knowledge and the recruitment of other nonlinguistic processing skills, may influence a measurement's sensitivity. The findings are pertinent to the practice of speech-language pathologists, informing evidence-based assessment procedures for bilingual children. A group study to determine whether the suggested bilingual standards can identify ALD with acceptable specificity and sensitivity is now recommended.

Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) of Lexical Breadth and Depth in the Vocabulary of Bilingual Kindergarten Children - A Bilingual Intervention Study

Introduction: Research in recent years has explored the vocabulary size (lexical breadth) of bilingual children, but less is known about the richness of bilingual word knowledge (lexical depth), and about how knowledge of words in the two languages interact. This study explores how bilingual narrative intervention with vocabulary instruction in each language may modulate crosslinguistic influence (CLI) between the languages of bilingual kindergarten children, focusing on CLI of lexical knowledge, and which factors modulate performance. Methods: Forty-one typically developing English-Hebrew bilingual children (M = 64.63 months) participated. A bilingual adaptation of Story Champs narrative intervention program (Spencer and Petersen, 2012) was used to deliver vocabulary instruction in separate blocks of home language (HL) and school language (SL) sessions. Different intervention words were targeted in each language, but the children were tested on all target words in both languages. Lexical knowledge was assessed with a definition task four times throughout the study: prior to intervention, after each intervention block, and 4-6 weeks later. Learner characteristics (chronological age, age of onset of bilingualism and length of exposure) and proficiency in each language (standardized tests, familiarity with the vocabulary introduced in the intervention at baseline) were examined as possible modulators of performance. Results: Children showed growth in lexical breadth and depth in their HL/English after HL intervention and in lexical breadth in the SL/Hebrew following SL intervention, with CLI for semantic depth observed via a qualitative analysis, but not quantitatively. Better HL/English performance was correlated with later AoB (and shorter SL exposure) and higher HL language proficiency scores. Children with higher HL/English proficiency responded better to the SL/Hebrew intervention, gaining more than those with lower English proficiency. Children with SL/Hebrew vocabulary dominance at the outset of the study also gained more from the HL/English intervention. No correlations were found between learner characteristics and SL performance. Discussion: The current study indicates that bilingual narrative intervention with vocabulary instruction may be efficacious for improving the lexical breadth and depth of bilingual kindergarten children. It suggests that CLI may enhance bilingual children's language learning success, and points to the importance of strengthening both languages of bilingual children.