Language Growth in Bilingual Children 

Our first group of children completed the study in June, and we are now working with the second and third groups of participants. Our second group of participants are now first graders, and will complete the study in June; the third group is made up of kindergarteners, who just began the study this fall. 

We are making progress in analyzing the language samples that we will use to measure language growth during the study. That will enable us to look at how language skills grow in kindergarten and first grade for bilingual children.

We have explored different ways of scoring our nonword repetition task to see if some scoring methods are less biased than others.

We have considered the ways in which parent and teacher reports regarding language skills in bilingual kindergarten children are consistent with each other.

Our new narrative dynamic assessment task looks like a promising assessment option. It is reliable and captures children's performance well. We still need to see if it predicts language growth.

We have shown that several different dynamic and processing-based tasks are feasible for children with different amounts of English exposure.

Most of our assessment tasks are reliable, which means they are consistent in what they measure. We have considered internal consistency, or whether each task measures the same thing throughout the task, as well as test-retest reliability, which indicates whether a task gives consistent results across time.

We will complete the study with our current groups of children, and we plan to recruit one more group of children in summer & fall 2026.

We need to begin looking at how well our assessment tasks predict language growth in our participating children.

We will finalize all our analyses to determine the best assessment tasks for bilingual children.

We will work to make the most promising tasks accessible for practitioners.