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Holistic Linguistics: An in-depth analysis of six bilingual English-French children living in Quebec City
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- Author / Creator
- Barkowsky, Jana
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The Problem: When it comes to assessing and intervening with bilingual populations, language interventionists face a difficult problem. Not only is there a lack of standardized tests for these populations, but even the use of the few that exist have limits about their conclusions. These limits are dependent on questions about language exposure. Assessing a balanced, simultaneous bilingual is likely to wield different language results than a child with the same profile whose bilingualism began after the age of three years. To address this issue, in-depth analyses of how these factors all interact in bilingual children are needed. While these analyses have traditionally focused on monolingual children, the use of bilingual children requires certain other factors to be considered, such as age of exposure, and types and amount of ongoing exposure.
Objective: Based on best practices in the field of speech-language pathology, this study will use formal testing and parent questionnaires to evaluate internal and external factors of bilingual language development.
Methods: Case study analyses were conducted of six children living in Quebec City who were four-years-old. Formal testing was used to evaluate expressive and receptive vocabulary, narration, phonological awareness, and phonological production abilities. Parent questionnaires provided information on weekly hours spent with parents in each language and weekly hours spent in an academic setting.
Conclusions: Narrative scores were the most consistent variable across participants, as expected. Expressive vocabulary was the least consistent and often the lowest-scoring domain. The children scored the highest on receptive vocabulary in one or both languages. Phonological abilities (measured via percent consonant correct) were all higher in English, even for children who were exposed to more French than English. Interestingly, all participants had speech that was intelligible for their age, based on whole word match, in one or both of their languages of at least 60%. In terms of phonological awareness, the three bilingual children who spent a balanced amount of time in each language with their parents had the lowest phonological awareness scores, while the children who spent an unequal amount of time (20% or less in one of the languages) had superior phonological awareness scores in one or both of their languages. Amount of time spent in a French academic setting was positively associated with French narrative skills in terms of First Mentions on the ENNI. While different language profiles were observed in these 6 cases, parent reports of time spent in each language were related to 5 of the 6 language profiles.
Implications: These results indicate that, even with parent reports of language exposure amount, good practice includes assessing in all of a child’s languages to get a full profile of their strengths and weaknesses. -
- Graduation date
- Fall 2023
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.