Bilingualism And The Dyslexic Child

Bilingualism is common in many countries, but for the dyslexic child, acquiring literacy skills in two languages can be problematic. 'Bilingualism' is a very broad term and the magnitude of the term could explain why there have been very few studies to actually compare the performance of bilingual dyslexics in two languages. Although 'bilingualism' usually means being equally skilled in two languages, this can be difficult to determine because the student's educational, cultural, social and geographical factors also have to be taken into consideration. Therefore, research on bilingual people must include a wide variety of individuals.

It is important to be careful when discussing difficulties in languages other than English because the differences in language structure, as well as the methods used to teach reading and writing, could give rise to the use of different channels for the purposes of reading. Wimmer and Goswami (1994), suggest that a universal model of reading development is not possible. Languages such as German which have a close grapheme-phoneme correspondence might omit the "locographic" stage of reading development. Bilingual children exposed to languages of different orthographies will therefore probably have different difficulties.

It can be a challenge to identify a child's learning disability in countries where more than one language is spoken because a child's limited development can be incorrectly thought to be due to insufficient exposure to the language. Bilingual children can therefore be wrongly classified (Hall, 1995). In countries like Malta, for example, where children need to be able to use two languages, a delay in identifying a learning disorder can cause parents a great deal of anxiety. But it is much more difficult to identify a bilingual child's literacy difficulty because accurately measuring the bilingual child's skills can be a problem. Also, tests that measure deviancy from the norm are often not available in certain countries and many of these tests are inappropriate for the assessment of bilingual children.

When assessing a bilingual child, it is important to begin by finding out if the child has a dominant language. Then the following areas should be investigated in the two languages the child uses: whether the child realises that the languages he uses might employ different phoneme to grapheme correspondences, whether the child can blend sounds together to form words, and whether the child is able to segment words into syllables. A thorough reading assessment should also be undertaken, as well as an investigation into the child's spelling strategies - especially to determine whether there is any interference between one language and the other.

In her case studies, Christine Firman presents two Maltese-English children with contrasting preferences. Tommy, exposed mainly to Maltese, finds English reading and spelling easier, whereas Peter, whose first language is English, finds Maltese spelling and English reading to be easier. Tommy has phonological weakness, whereas Peter has phonic strengths. This suggests the possibility that phonic strengths and weaknesses could determine literacy development in the different languages.

Identifying and assessing dyslexia in bilingual students requires an understanding of the structure of both languages. It is not possible to state that one language is more difficult than another. When assessing a student, one must try and uncover the student's underlying strength and weaknesses in relation to the different languages. Therefore, a student's language preference can be unconsciously determined by the student's own learning pattern. Individual differences must then be taken into account before starting a remediation programme.

References

Hall, D. (1995). Assessing the Need of Bilingual Pupils Living in Two Languages. London: David Fulton Publishers.

Wimmer, H., & Goswami, U. (1994). The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: Word recognition in English and German children. Cognition, 51, 91-103