Intervention with Bilingual Pre-School Children

Abstract

Speech therapy intervention with pre-school children is on the increase, partly due to clinicians’ greater knowledge and understanding of early child development, particularly language. This has not only helped to identify language breakdown in early developmental stages, but also to describe the stages along which therapy can proceed. Other professionals, such as paediatricians, psychologists and health visitors, are also referring children for speech therapy much earlier due to their increasing awareness of the speech therapist’s role with very young children. Obviously early intervention has the benefit of remediation at the optimum age for language acquisition. This holds true for children who are exposed to more than one language, but there are additional issues to consider for these children such as sociocultural differences and the complexity of the linguistic environment. The fact that the majority of clinicians are monolingual but may be treating bilingual children from different cultures is another complicating factor. This chapter introduces the concept of speech therapy intervention with pre-school children, and sociocultural, socioeconomic, linguistic and psychological factors which are likely to affect the linguistic development of ethnic minority children are touched upon. In addition, we shall discuss assessment and management issues, and describe a speech therapy clinic set up for a specific minority population.