Common Misconceptions and Statistics

I recently attended a staff development workshop that addressed how to best support bilingualism in children with disabilities. One of my colleagues, Marzena Zabek, presented on this topic and I would like to share some of the key points I took away from this presentation.

Some statistics:
- In California, 39% of preschoolers speak a home language other than English.
- In Los Angeles County, 55% of children entering kindergarten do not speak English.
- In the state of CA, 56 langauges are spoken by children and their families.
- In the year 2005-2006, 25% of all CA's students were English learners

Marzena also addressed some of the common misconceptions about young children who are English learners. The following beliefs are all false, yet widely accepted to be true!
- Hearing two or more languages will confuse the child and lead to grave problems in acquiring language (REALITY: Children who are thought to be delayed in one language often show the same type of delay in the other language that they speak. Bilingualism itself does not CAUSE language impairment)
- Children have to be especially intelligent to be able to cope with more than one language (REALITY: Infants have the INNATE ability to learn different languages)
- Children mix languages (REALITY: Well, this is partly true...see my post on code-switching. But usually, children mix languages to fill in the gaps in one language with words from another. It's a very common practice and shows that they have an understanding of both languages)
- Bilingualism causes academic failure (REALITY: Bilingual children perform higher academically, have richer vocabulary and have shown to have other cognitive benefits than their monolingual peers.)

Here are some implications for practice when working with families from diverse backgrounds:
- Value and respect home languages
- Initiate discussions with families about family language preferences
- Translate written and spoken communication
- Display and use story books, songs, etc. from other cultures so that all children will develop a sense of cultural awareness
- Promote diversity in the classroom by having authentic materials, costumes, toys, and utensils that represent different cultures
- Celebrate different cultural holidays in the classroom and invite parents to participate and share their traditions

Special thanks to Marzena Zabek's presentation on "Supporting Bilingualism in Children with Disabilities"