Linguistic features.

on biased method to help understand what may be a language delay versus a language difference.

Second-language acquisition is often misunderstood. Professional development needs to concentrate on this area to foster appropriate educational programming in public schools. For example, a child exposed to English normally has a silent period during which he or she may not use the new language to speak.

This silent period is often mislabeled as problematic and even as a possible symptom of language disorder. And the implications of inappropriate special education referral of a bilingual child are enormous. It is likely that if professionals possessed the tools and resources to conduct second-language analyses giving insight into children’s abilities as second-language learners, the perceived need for bilingual testing of these children (intended to detect problems and fix them) would decrease drastically.

But there is an alternative to testing. A second-language analysis directly addresses the problem, providing a unique way for professionals to examine and more carefully consider the impact of first-language development on, and its role (interference) in, second-language development. Children who are learning can often miss out on specialized language support and on access to mainstream curriculum, thus redirecting their academic futures. Misdiagnosis or overdiagnosis can place typically developing children in restrictive settings not appropriate to their unique learning styles. Parents should know the duration and type of language support children from second-language homes often require.

Parents also need to know the kind of help or support provided to children who are still acquiring English, as well as whether the home language and its distinctness from English will be taken into consideration when assessing children’s academic performance. Often parents of bilingual or second-language children need additional background knowledge in order to understand academic assessments—and, therefore, to evaluate whether the recommendations of schools and personnel are appropriate for a child. The use of linguistic features analysis when working with second-language children allows professionals to assess, via knowledge of the features of a given language, what is actually occurring in a child’s language development. With this analysis, potential interference of one language with the second may be identified and mitigated at a much earlier stage.

Although linguistic features analysis requires professionals to take into consideration first-language interference (errors), proper weight may not be given to the factor. When reassessing children years after an initial misdiagnosis, 

this author found that the effect of the first-language system was given its proper weight in fewer than 20 percent of the cases. Professionals must have resources that not only describe the features of languages but that also delineate patterns of interference common between language systems. A child whose first language (L1) is Spanish may inconsistently confuse possession in English speech, but it is essential to remember that in Spanish, male and female possession are coded with the same possessive pronoun, making an understanding of this feature of the Spanish language necessary to a nonbiased assessment of the child’s language skill sets. If educators do not possess this knowledge, the likelihood of overdiagnosis and mislabeling increases drastically.

Familiarity with a child’s sociolinguistic environment is a similar help to educators, because that environment influences native language development as well as second-language acquisition. If professionals can discover how the features of various linguistic systems and some trends affect various second-language learners, the number of special education referrals may well decrease.

Simultaneously, access to and development of the types of ESL programs and methods likely to reach these students may be ramped up, broadening and deepening understanding of the first language’s areas of interference into the second language (L2), and of the specific linguistic features of the various systems implicated. Several methodologies effectively interact with ELL students, including cooperative learning and the language experience approach. The better we understand first languages and their particulars, the less likely we will be to confuse indications of second-language learning with symptoms of language-learning disorders.

Given the opportunity, practitioners and examiners can make good use of publications that explain the features of various language systems and provide examples of how to use this information to evaluate the importance of a child’s second-language difficulties, including any possible speaking problems. This information is most useful as part of a second-language analysis. Unfortunately, a great many comprehension difficulties are caused by phonemic (sounds that have multiple meanings) and phonetic (sounds that are similar to each other) confusion—or even by the ways that these sounds’ behavior in English varies by word and phrase environments (Ted Klein 2007).

Familiarity with the difficulties commonly experienced by speakers of other languages when learning English can help us appropriately assist these students, decreasing the likelihood of our referring them to special educational programs to remedy problems we think need fixing.

As we learn about the features of some of the non-English languages currently represented in our public schools, we will also learn how to use this information to document interference. We will take a look at the languages most commonly represented within school populations across the United States and begin to understand how to use this new information during comprehensive second-language analyses, as well as in classroom instruction. Such an approach clearly holds potential for reducing the number of minority learners relegated to special education. As interference is documented earlier and earlier, fewer children will be inappropriately referred to such programs. As in all areas of education, early identification is crucial. Any non-English linguistic system (or even dialect)—from African-American subcultural diction and syntax to Spanish—can interfere with a second-language system, possibly leading to an incorrect diagnosis of a disorder.

There are few places for clinicians or teachers to obtain information about children’s first languages or to study interference from L1 to L2. The following case histories (in which the names have been changed) are drawn from some of the languages most commonly found in American schools today, and they analyze and describe some of those languages’ peculiarities.

The use of linguistic features analysis gives listeners a way to predict the interference they may encounter in the learning process of a second-language learner, identifying likely errors in articulation or grammar. By combining this approach and a familiarity with the peculiarities of Spanish to help understand a Spanish speaker’s pronunciation of English—particularly a speaker of Spanish-influenced English, who may in ways be incapable of clear communication while still in the basic interpersonal communication stage of English language learning. Over time, mastery of English content words brings about an improved production model. The better we comprehend what we are saying in a particular language, the clearer our understanding of that language’s pronunciation system is likely to be.

Application of the linguistic features analysis will help educators understand that by incorporating the features of a student’s language system and then by applying the tenets of second-language acquisition to a presenting profile of the student, a more reliable determination of any language problem or difference can result. We 

can also make a strong case that the application of linguistic features analysis results in earlier correct deductions about the child’s profile. Each language system has associated with it distinctive features that individualize it from other linguistic systems. Therefore, knowledge of the features of different languages is predicted to assist (and has been documented to assist) the educator in his or her quest to understand whether a child is displaying characteristics of second-language learning or of a language disorder.