2025
Elena Tribushinina, Betül Boz
Introduction: Both multilingualism and developmental language disorder (DLD) may be associated with inferior performance in the majority language, albeit for different reasons. At the same time, there is a growing body of evidence that multilingualism may have a positive effect on foreign language performance. This study tests the hypothesis that the positive effects of multilingualism on foreign language learning may be smaller in children with DLD compared to their multilingual peers with typical language development.
Methods: In a 2 × 2 design, we compare the effects of multilingualism and DLD on English as a foreign language performance and majority language performance of multilinguals and monolinguals with and without DLD. The participants were primary school children (aged 9–13) acquiring Dutch as the majority language and learning English as a school subject. English skills were measured with a vocabulary test, a grammar test and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Dutch skills were assessed with the Litmus Sentence Repetition Task and the MAIN task. The MAIN narratives in both languages were analyzed for fluency, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy. The control variables included age, working memory, declarative memory, procedural memory and (for English) amount of extracurricular exposure and length of instruction. Data were analyzed by means of multilevel linear regression.
Results: The results demonstrate that both multilingualism and DLD were associated with lower scores on the Dutch Sentence Repetition Task and lower grammatical accuracy of narratives. In English, the multilinguals outperformed monolinguals on all measures, except grammatical accuracy of narratives, and the interactions between Background and Group were not significant. Another strong predictor of EFL performance, along with the multilingual status, was extracurricular exposure to English.
2024
Jasmijn Stolvoort, Megan Mackaaij, Elena Tribushinina
Introduction: Like children with typical language development, their peers with developmental language disorder (DLD) are expected to learn English as a foreign language (EFL). For pupils without DLD, it is well-established that amount of informal exposure to English outside of the classroom, starting age of EFL instruction and motivation are strong positive predictors of EFL learning rate and/or achievement, whereas anxiety is negatively related to performance. This paper is the first attempt to investigate how these predictors of EFL performance operate in learners with DLD.
Methods: Participants were nineteen Dutch-speaking 7th graders with DLD learning English as a school subject at a specialist education facility in the Netherlands. English receptive grammar and receptive vocabulary were measured twice, with a four-month interval. Foreign language learning motivation, anxiety and (length and amount of) informal exposure to and instruction in English were measured via questionnaires.
Results: The participants did not show any progress on English vocabulary and grammar. At Time 1, vocabulary and grammar scores were positively related to starting age of EFL instruction and negatively related to anxiety. For vocabulary, achievement was also positively predicted by attitudes towards English lessons. Only the relationship between starting age of instruction and vocabulary outcomes was visible at Time 2. Amount and length of informal exposure to English did not predict performance, which is in stark contrast to the patterns observed in EFL learners with typical language development.
Conclusions: We conclude that children with DLD benefit from a later onset of foreign language lessons, whereas length and amount of out-of-school exposure to English are less important in the context of DLD, possibly due to difficulty with implicit learning.
2023
Elena Tribushinina, Megan Mackaaij
Introduction: One of the bilingual advantages often reported in the literature on typically-developing children involves advantages in foreign language learning at school. However, it is unknown whether similar advantages hold for bilingual pupils with learning disabilities. In this study, we compare the performance of monolingual and bilingual primary-school children with developmental language disorder (DLD) learning English as a school subject in special education schools in the Netherlands.
Methods: The participants were monolingual (N = 49) and bilingual (N = 22) children with DLD attending Grade 4−6 of special education (age 9–12). The bilingual participants spoke a variety of home languages. The English tests included a vocabulary task, a grammar test and a grammaticality judgement task. The Litmus Sentence Repetition Task and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test were used as measures of, respectively, grammatical ability and vocabulary size in Dutch (majority/school language). In addition, samples of semi-spontaneous speech were elicited in both English and Dutch using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. The narratives were analysed for fluency, grammatical accuracy, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity. A questionnaire was used to measure amount of exposure to English outside of the classroom.
Results and discussion: The results for Dutch revealed no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals on the narrative measures, but monolinguals performed significantly better on both vocabulary and grammar. In contrast, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on all English measures, except grammatical accuracy of narratives. However, some of the differences became non-significant once we controlled for amount of out-of-school exposure to English. This is the first study to demonstrate that foreign language learning advantages extend to bilingual children with DLD. The results also underline the need to control for differences in out-of-school exposure to English when comparing bilingual and monolingual pupils on foreign language outcomes.
Elena Tribushinina, Geke Niemann, Joyce Meuwissen
This article is one of the first attempts to study the mechanisms of foreign language learning by children with DLD. We test the effectiveness of a cognate intervention aiming to enhance cross-linguistic awareness of Dutch-speaking primary-school pupils with DLD, as part of their English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum. The participants were learning English as a school subject in the last three years of special primary education in the Netherlands (ages 8;11–13;8). The intervention group (n = 41) received 12 short lessons on cognate relationships over the course of 14 weeks. The control group (n = 46), matched to the intervention group on the amount and intensity of foreign language instruction, received their regular English lessons that were mainly implicit and skill-based. The study used a pre-test–post-test design and compared the development of English word recognition in the two groups, at the same time controlling for the amount of prior EFL instruction and out-of-school exposure to English. The performance at pre-test was already high, particularly on cognates. Word recognition in the control group did not improve over the course of the 14 weeks. The performance of the intervention group showed significant improvement from pre-test to post-test. After the intervention, they recognized not only more of the words practised in the lessons but also more nontreated cognates, which demonstrates that the intervention participants developed a cognate strategy that allowed them to recognize more English words based on similarity to Dutch. We conclude that explicit cognate instruction implemented in a regular classroom setting facilitates the development of EFL vocabulary in special primary education.
Jasmijn Stolvoort, Joyce Meuwissen, Megan Mackaaij, Teun Boekel, Elena Tribushinina
Jasmijn Stolvoort, Joyce Meuwissen, Megan Mackaaij, Teun Boekel en Elena Tribushinina brengen verslag uit van een interventieonderzoek waarin basisschoolleerlingen met een taalontwikkelingsstoornis (TOS) in het speciaal onderwijs Engelse lessen kregen via een meertalige versie van de CodeTaal-aanpak. CodeTaal is een les-methode die taalbewustzijn vergroot en rekening houdt met de beperkingen van kinderen met TOS. De resultaten laten zien dat een- en meertalige leerlingen vooruit zijn gegaan in woordenschat en grammatica. Daarnaast hebben ze een woordleerstrategie aangeleerd waarbij ze nieuwe cognaten makkelijker konden herkennen. De leerlingen die de meeste moeite vertoonden met Engels voór de interventie toonden de grootste leeropbrengsten. Daarnaast bleek dat leerlingen de interventielessen even leuk vonden als de reguliere lessen.
Elena Tribushinina, Elena Dubinkina-Elgart, Pim Mak
Research on second language learning by children with DLD has mainly focused on naturalistic L2 acquisition with plenty of exposure. Very little is known about how children with DLD learn foreign languages in classroom settings with limited input. This study addresses this gap and targets English as a foreign language (EFL) learning by Russian-speaking children with DLD. We ask whether learners with DLD benefit from a later onset of EFL instruction because older children are more cognitively mature and have more developed L1 skills. The second aim of this study is to determine whether EFL learners with DLD benefit from positive L1 transfer in vocabulary learning. We administered a receptive vocabulary test to younger (Grade 6, n = 18) and older (Grade 10, n = 15) children with DLD matched on the amount of prior EFL instruction. The younger group started EFL instruction in Grade 2 and the older group in Grade 6. The performance of the two groups was compared after four and a half years of English lessons. Half of the words in the test were English-Russian cognates and half were noncognates. Contra to our hypothesis, the results showed no difference between younger and older children. Both groups equally benefitted from cognate vocabulary suggesting that positive cross-language transfer is available to children with DLD, irrespective of their age and onset of EFL instruction.
2022
Elena Tribushinina, Geke Niemann, Joyce Meuwissen, Megan Mackaaij, Gabriëlla Lahdo
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.
2020
Elena Tribushinina, Elena Dubinkina-Elgart, Nadezhda Rabkina
There is a growing pressure to teach foreign languages as early as possible, and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are not immune from these pressures. However, current scholarship lacks crucial insights into how children with DLD respond to L2 learning with minimal (classroom) exposure. In this paper, we report the results of a longitudinal study tracing the development of L1 Russian and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) skills in a group of learners with DLD (age of EFL onset: 7;9-12;1). The performance of the DLD group was compared to that of typically-developing controls, matched for classroom EFL exposure. Proficiency in English and Russian was measured three times (after one, one-and-a-half and two years of EFL instruction). At Time 1, there were no significant differences between groups on the EFL measures, but the performance of the typically-developing children significantly improved with time, and that of the DLD group did not. In the DLD group, age of EFL onset was positively related to English receptive vocabulary size. The relation between L1 and L2 proficiency in the DLD group was weaker than in the comparison group. This pattern is probably due to the floor performance of the DLD group in the grammatical domain, but may also indicate that the disorder affects cross-language transfer in the vulnerable domains.
2018
Hoe eerder hoe beter? Vreemdetalenonderwijs voor kinderen met een taalontwikkelingsstoornis
Elena Tribushinina
Kinderen met een TOS worden in toenemende mate blootgesteld aan vreemde talen, meestal het Engels. Hoe deze groep kinderen vreemde talen leren, is echter niet bekend omdat er geen onderzoek naar gedaan is. In dit artikel worden twee mogelijke scenario’s besproken op basis van het bestaande onderzoek naar het leren van vreemde talen door jonge kinderen zonder TOS en naar de natuurlijke verwerving van een tweede taal door kinderen met TOS.
