Language Growth in Bilingual Children 

Two groups of children have completed the study! Our third group of participants is in progress, and our fourth will be recruited this fall. We appreciate our participating families!

We have made our narrative dynamic assessment task publicly available here. This gives access to clinicians and researchers who want to use our tool.

We continue to work on analyzing our data, including 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, and with other direct measures of children's language skills.

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. Some of our tasks may be too hard for children with minimal 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.

Teachers tend to provide lower ratings of children's language skills than parents do. Both parent and teacher ratings of language correspond with direct measures of vocabulary knowledge for children though, so it may be that teachers and parents have different perspectives on children's abilities.

We will recruit one more group of children in this summer & fall, and then follow group 3 through the spring of 2027 and group 4 through the spring of 2028.

We will examine 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.