Pedagogy

Work cited Tabors, P.  Snow C. (2003). Young bilingual children and early literacy development. In Handbook of early literacy research volume 1(Home and community influences.) Retrieved from

This research discusses the differences encountered by bilingual children compared with monolingual children, focusing on how the environment of these children affects their language development, with comprehension and mastery of language being the primary topics of discussion. First to be discussed is a bilingual childs limited range of vocabulary. A child is expected to know a number of words depending on their age. According to the author, bilingual children oftentimes have problems with developing a good vocabulary for both languages resulting to mixing up of words, confusion, and not really getting it right. Aside from vocabulary problems, another is the ability of a bilingual child to properly organize words in a sentence. The article have cited researches that show high incidences of children having a hard time communicating because they just have no control over the words, especially when dealing with more complex syntax forms. The author concludes that all of these may become detrimental to the child especially when having to deal languages in school. However, there are a lot that can be done to avoid such problems from arising. As mentioned in the article, parents must make sure that the child receives equal input of both languages, and expose them to a wide range of vocabulary to compensate for the divided attention to the languages. Although bilingualism may pose a threat of delay language development, one must remember that the context in which the child learns and uses both languages is a strong contributing factor that may either make bilingualism as strength or as a weakness of the child.

The authors of this article are both reliable sources. Patton O. Tabo has obtained a doctorate degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focusing on human development and child language. She has served as a research associate, specializing in language and literacy comprehension of English monolingual and bilingual speakers. Similar with her, Catherine Snow is also from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has become one of its associate professor. She is a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingualism Language and Cognition just to name a few. The source site for this article has no advertisements of any services and products aside from books with similar topics. Over all, this is a reliable source of information regarding bilingualism and language delay. Although the article was cut, therefore disabling it to show the full list of references, the author was able to provide in text citations almost throughout the article.