Dynamic assessment of multilingual children's word learning

Area of Science:

• Child language development
• Second language acquisition
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Assessing multilingual children's language development presents challenges for educators and clinicians.
• Dynamic assessments offer a promising avenue for identifying and supporting language growth in these children.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a novel, language-neutral dynamic assessment task for measuring word learning in multilingual children.
• To investigate how multilingual children utilize language transfer, fast mapping, and socially embedded learning in acquiring new words.

Main Methods:

• A dynamic assessment task (test-teach-retest) was administered to 26 kindergarten children with diverse home languages, all assessed in French.
• Children's performance was compared to parent-reported language abilities, language exposure, and standardized vocabulary test scores.

Main Results:

• Children demonstrated higher accuracy with known words, suggesting first language transfer.
• Increased accuracy across trials indicated fast mapping of new vocabulary.
• Scores on the dynamic task correlated with standardized vocabulary tests but not with parent reports or language exposure.

Conclusions:

• The novel dynamic task effectively assesses vocabulary learning processes in multilingual children, independent of prior language knowledge.
• Findings offer insights into early word learning and propose a model for supporting second language acquisition.
• This approach aids in identifying effective scaffolding strategies for clinicians supporting multilingual learners.