Bilingual Effect on Written Language Skills in Kannada English Bilingual Biliterate Children with Learning Disability

Abstract

Researchers have noted that research on written language has taken a backseat compared to studies on reading difficulties. This has been the case even though both children and adults with learning disabilities were noted to manifest equal difficulties in both reading and writing. Development of written language is crucial since children are routinely assessed based on their performance on written examinations in academic settings. Also, research has proven that writing is a language-based skill. Thus, assessment of written language comes under the purview of Speech Language Pathologists. Moreover, research in the area of written language has concentrated only on one language. But researchers have criticized generalization of results obtained for monolinguals to bilinguals due to various reasons such as bilinguals differing from monolinguals in terms of cognitive and lexical processing. Majority of the population in the Indian scenario are emerging bilingual-biliterates who are acquiring literacy in two languages simultaneously. Therefore, in this scenario, assessment of written language in bilingual-biliterate children becomes imperative. Therefore, the present study was designed to assess if there is a bilingual effect on the written language skills in Kannada-English bilingual biliterate children with Learning Disability. In order to explore the effect of bilingualism on the written language of children with Learning Disability (LD), 45 children with LD were compared with 150 age and language matched Typically Developing Children (TDC). Children studying in the 4th, 5th and 6th grades with Kannada as the native language and English as the medium of instruction in schools were recruited for the study. Eight written samples were collected from each participant in the study including four tasks written in Kannada and four tasks written in English in the narrative and expository genre. The results were analyzed based on microstructural and cross-linguistic parameters of written language. Within groups, across language comparisons; across grade comparisons and between group comparisons were made. Results of correlation analysis revealed that there was a significant positive correlation among some of the parameters and no negative correlation between parameters in Kannada and English. This may imply that written language development in the two languages is not independent and the absence of negative correlation may imply no negative effect of bilingualism in both TDC and children with LD. The results of the study reveal that the microstructural and cross-linguistic parameters follow a script dependent hypothesis in TDC since there was differential effects of language at word level and sentence level. At the word level, English had a greater influence on Kannada whereas, at the sentence level, Kannada had a greater influence on English. In children with LD, the findings point towards a central processing deficit hypothesis since they performed poorer than TDC in both Kannada and English. But when, results were inspected within the LD group, it was found that the findings supported a script dependent hypothesis similar to TDC.