Elena Tribushinina

Is a language disorder an impediment to foreign language learning?

Abstract

The world-wide tendency towards early onset of foreign language instruction inevitably affects children with developmental language disorder (DLD), which is one of the most common learning disabilities, affecting 7–8% of children. Children with DLD have language deficits in the absence of hearing and intellectual impairments or frank neurological damage. Surprisingly, foreign language learning in this population is a largely unexplored terrain. In this talk, I will present the results of our first attempts to pinpoint how several well-known predictors of English as a foreign language (EFL) learning success operate in pupils with DLD attending specialist education facilities. The findings from these pioneering studies reveal that, like in pupils with typical language development, age of instruction, extramural exposure, motivation and anxiety explain a great deal of variation in EFL outcomes amongst children with DLD. Also, like in typical language development, bilingualism appears to play a facilitating role in learning additional languages, yielding some intriguing and thus far ununderstood asymmetries and paradoxes. However, pupils with DLD have more difficulty with implicit language learning due to procedural learning deficits, particularly in limited-input (classroom) settings. Furthermore, positive cross-language transfer appears to be less available to children with DLD compared to their typically-developing peers. Based on these novel insights, we developed several interventions tailored to the specific needs of EFL learners with DLD. The first results demonstrate that children with DLD can make progress in EFL learning if supported by explicit vocabulary and grammar instruction raising metalinguistic and cross-linguistic awareness.