Bilingual Children with Specific Language Impairment and Standardized Assessments: Preliminary Findings from a Study of Children in Language Units

Abstract

This paper focuses on a group of bilingual children within a large cohort of children with specific language impairment (SLI) attending language units attached to mainstream primary schools across England. Comparison of the bilingual children with their monolingual peers revealed differential performance on standardized speech and language assessment measures. Further analysis suggested that children with semantic and/or pragmatic difficulties perform differently to those without such difficulties, and that the relationships between bilinguals' and monolinguals' scores are substantially different for these two groups. Bilingual children were found to have less of a variety of combinations of language difficulties than their monolingual peers, although this was not found to have a direct influence on their test scores. However, accounting for severity of difficulties went some way towards explaining the difference on test scores for one group of bilingual children. This paper seeks to set these preliminary results in the context of current knowledge about the assessment and treatment of bilingual pupils in special educational needs provision within mainstream schools, and to inform further research in this somewhat neglected area.