I have created and developed a special second language analysis tool – Second Language Analyzer™ – which will play an integral part in helping us to distinguish language difference versus language disorder. This tool will lead you through with all the information necessary to go through the process to determine difference from disorder.

The tool consists of a series of interviews designed to elicit necessary information necessary for a comprehensive analysis of a child’s abilities as a second-language learner, to identify any factors that may facilitate and or hinder their second-language acquisition journey.

This will occur since within this tool or as a result of this tool, you will know how to conduct a second language analysis as this tool will guide you through the process. It will be an “if … then” process, and guidance will be provided as to the next step after previous steps are exhausted. It is my contention that, if we as an educational community, became skilled on conducting second-language analyses, the need for bilingual speech language and other educational evaluations would diminish.

This tool is additionally designed to assist the practitioner in differentiating between a language difference and a disorder by using interview questions and forms with specific questions and information included within this tool to elicit the needed information to be able to make the determination. It truly is an enigma – does the child possess a delay, or are they linguistically different? Is what we are seeing an aspect of the second language acquisition (SLA) process?

If so, what aspect of SLA are we seeing? Is it interlanguage? Fossilization? Silent period? And are we able to identify it and differentiate it from a symptom of a language problem? It is true that many children who are needlessly referred to special education are not benefiting via the means used by teachers in the classroom – the one size approach does not fit all.

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. 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.

The linguistic features analysis product was created from the notion and true realization that without the provision of the features of various languages to practitioners, consideration of first-language impact upon second in terms of interference would be more difficult to establish. Not only does it provide this information needed to conduct second language analyses but also provides examples of how to conduct second-language analyses as well.

Both skill sets will better position the professional to deal with this population of children – ranging from English language learners (ELLs) coming from divergent and discrepant educational backgrounds to ELLs with stronger educational backgrounds with emerging literacy in English.

The linguistic features analysis (LFA) product will demonstrate to the practitioner not only the various features of different language systems commonly represented in public schools but also provide general guidance as to how to use this information to conduct second language analyses. When done accurately, these analyses look at the competencies of second language learners and have implications for feeding input to guide the creation of more effective instructional practices for ELLs.

This product will assist the practitioner and the user in the endeavor of differentiating language difference from disorder and will assist in doing comprehensive second-language analyses wherein the competencies of second language learners in the acquisition of English are at the heart of our efforts. In this way, we in essence seek to replace the temptation and trend of testing to find a problem when in reality in many instances the children who are learning English as a second language are exhibiting differences.

Here is an example of how LFA is used and can aid in the conducting of a comprehensive second language analysis:

Portuguese is a Romance language that is closely related to Spanish. Portuguese is the native language of approximately 97 percent of Brazilians. There are two dialects of Portuguese – Brazilian and European (the former is associated with Rio de Janeiro). The pronunciation used by the two is different, and many divergences in vocabulary exist – for example, European Portuguese incorporates more words of Arabic origin than does Brazilian Portuguese, which has borrowed a large number of its words from South American Indian languages.

Some similarities between the Portuguese languages and English do exist. Portuguese uses a terminal /s/ to pluralize nouns and has regular and irregular verbs and active and passive forms. However, word order is much freer in Portuguese than it is in English. This means that in Portuguese, nonsubject elements are commonly placed at the fronts of sentences (as in “Games I play.”). This type of grammatical difference may be something teachers may be tempted to mistake for a disorder.

It is interesting to note, however, that both Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese speakers may find the reading of academic or scientific literature much less difficult than actually comprehending spoken English.

Here are some additional language features of Portuguese:

Portuguese uses a single word to mean “why” and “because.” I have worked with many teachers who pick up on this pattern as an error instead of a difference and then are unable to support the second-language process after doing so. This can be avoided by directly teaching teachers about the similarities and dissimilarities between different languages’ uses of words to indicate meanings.

Portuguese also uses one word to mean “as” and “like.” This can obviously cause some confusion when translated into English.

Still more examples of this word-to-concepts overlapping of domains are evident in the pairings “rob–steal,” “lend–borrow,” and “play–amuse.”
In Portuguese, short answers to questions nevertheless repeat the verb central to the question. “Do you like running?” is answered by saying, “No, I do not like” or “I like.”

Let’s outline some of the features of Portuguese that make it conceptually different from English. The vowel systems of the two languages are quite different. English has 12 pure vowels, but Brazilian Portuguese has nine, and European Portuguese has only eight. Some of the factors that contribute to the perceived Portuguese accent include frequent nasal vowels and the insertion of intrusive vowels between consonants.

However, from a grammatical perspective, many similarities exist between Portuguese and English. Like English, Portuguese uses the present perfect for recent actions and events involving the present, as in, “The weather has been beautiful lately,” or, “She hasn’t been to work lately”– but no present perfect progressive exists in spoken Portuguese.

Instead, the simple present or present progressive are used in most equivalent situations, leading Brazilian speakers to say things such as, “I am studying English for six years” when meaning, “I have been studying English for six years.” The double negative is accepted and used in Portuguese. In English, however, use of double negatives may cause individuals to be perceived as unable to use grammar well enough to express themselves.

From a social (and practical) point of view, speakers of Portuguese may tend to position themselves closer together physically while speaking; furthermore, physical touching in such instances is more accepted than it is in American culture, where these conventions may be misinterpreted. In fact, the period of normally accepted nonemotional eye contact is lengthier among Brazilian speakers of Portuguese than among the majority of European speakers of the same language!

Data like this are exactly the reason that second-language analyses are of such importance – especially second-language analyses that involve a metasociolinguistic analysis, meaning that the interactions of society and language are taken into account.

Good second-language analysis carefully incorporates understandings of the peculiarities of children’s second-language learning processes, identifying the unique qualities of each learner’s situation, as well as those qualities of the learners themselves, that may make language learning more (or less) eventful. The assessment process – looking for problems to fix – is not used. Rather, learners’ sociolinguistic environments are studied carefully, as are the ways in which they affect learners’ language-learning capacities.

The information about a second language that is yielded by language features analysis proves invaluable in allowing practitioners to probe and identify any potential interference from the first language system to the second, something often otherwise mistaken for evidence of a language pathology.

A boy of 7 years was referred to me for second-language analysis. If the school refers for assessment, I call the information I collect during the process “second-language analysis,” because this procedure should be done first. The child’s home environment consisted of total exposure to Portuguese from monolingual parents – in other words, of absolutely no exposure to English in the home.

After two years in Chicago public schools, he and his siblings – aged 12 and 13 – displayed difficulties in acquiring English, something perhaps caused by minimal acculturation in the home and by limited opportunities for using the language. Note that, according to parental interviews and clinical probing, none of these youngsters displayed a history of language learning problems.

The key to successful parent interview and ethnographic survey lies in conveying approval and validation of the home language and culture as well as of cultural differences.

– Deborah Chitester, MS, CCC/SLP, is an ASHA-certified bilingual speech-language pathologist and owner of Second Language, Literacy, and Learning Connection, LLC in Pennington, N.J. Questions and comments can be directed to editorial@therapytimes.com.