I look forward to my summers. I usually try to catch up with my reading and then think about the next school year. This summer will be busy for me, I'm presenting at 2 conferences and an Institute at Saint Louis University. So I'll be busy getting ready for these and also thinking about my priorities for the next academic year. I hope that you're summer will be restful and you'll make some time for some professional development. Remember that the Bilingual Therapies Symposium is July 15-17th in Las Vegas, NV. It looks like a great line up of speakers and it's always a fun conference.
I've got some interesting articles and books that you might take a look at this summer. These two books will be coming out in July and August.
Goldstein, B. (Ed.) (August, 2004). Bilingual language development
and disorders in Spanish-English speakers. Baltimore: Brookes
Publishing Co.
Areas covered include: language processing skills; lexical development;
morpho-syntactic development; first language loss; grammatical
impairments; semantic development; phonological development and
disorders; narrative development and disorders; and fluency.
Cost: $35 Contact: www.brookespublishing.com
Genesee, F. Paradis, J., & Crago, M.B. (July, 2004). Dual
language development & disorders: A handbook on bilingualism
and second language learners.
Areas covered include: dual language development; raising a bilingual
child; processes of bilingual and second-0language acquisition;
cognitive development; code-mixing; diagnosis of disorders; and
factors in intervention.
Cost: $35 Contact: www.brookespublishing.com
I really want to get these two books. I have a feeling that these two books will become our texts for practice with bilingual children. The authors are excellent so I can assure you that the content will be the best.
An interesting article that came out recently is the following:
Gorman, B. K. & Gillam, R. B. (2004). Phonological awareness in Spanish: A tutorial for speech-language pathologists. Communication Disorders Quarterly 25:1, pp. 13-22.
Abstract: This tutorial provides research-based recommendations for presenting phonological awareness tasks to children who receive literacy instruction in Spanish The authors also discuss how phonological awareness development may differ between monolingual children learning Spanish and monolingual children learning English, and the implications of these differences for choosing appropriate phonological awareness tasks for Spanish speakers.
This article is a great description of phonological awareness tasks that have been studied in Spanish speaking children. The authors provide tables that list the various studies on a number of skills such as rhyming, phoneme matching, sound identification, embedded phonemes, sound deletion segmentation, blending, spelling, and writing. Many of the tasks are recommended because these are expected skills for English speaking children.
The authors provide very specific tasks to prepare the child for English literacy. Interestingly, these tasks are not usually part of Spanish literacy instruction. If children are taught these tasks in the native language then these skills will transfer to English literacy instruction. Phonological awareness tasks are another set of keys to helping Spanish-speaking children with English literacy. It doesn‚t seem to be enough that they learn to read in their native language, they now have to be taught tasks in the native language that will help them learn to read in English. English is a difficult language and not easily learned. I guess that's why we have No Child Left Behind. English speaking children are having difficulty with literacy also.
I see this information is valuable for clinicians who are working with bilingual classroom teachers. Providing these activities in a brief format that teachers might incorporate into Spanish literacy instruction should have an impact on the transfer of these skills into children's development of English literacy. At least that's the hypothesis.
Take a look at this article. Summarize it. Pass it out to your
teachers in your building. It is interesting reading.
Have a great summer. Remember, we tell our children to read this
summer, go out and do likewise!!
