Effects of early foreign language instruction and L1 transfer on vocabulary skills of EFL learners with DLD

Explicit cognate instruction facilitates vocabulary learning by foreign language learners with developmental language disorder

“…Based on the previous findings that children with DLD show a cognate advantage in vocabulary recognition tasks (Grasso et al, 2018;Kohnert et al, 2004;Tribushinina et al, 2023), we predicted that Dutch EFL learners should recognize more cognates than noncognates. RQ2: Does cognate recognition improve after the intervention?…”

“…Is it necessary to teach cognates explicitly and to apply teaching interventions enhancing cognate awareness? On the one hand, children with and without DLD have been shown to perform better on cognates than on noncognates without any prior instruction raising cognate awareness (Grasso et al, 2018; Kohnert et al, 2004; Payesteh and Pham, 2022; Tribushinina et al, 2023), which may suggest that explicit cognate instruction is less of a priority in FL lessons. On the other hand, researchers have expressed the desirability of cognate interventions (August et al, 2005; Payesteh and Pham, 2022), based on insights from intervention studies demonstrating that bilinguals are more likely to use cognate strategies and to recognize more cognates after explicit cognate instruction (Dressler et al, 2011; Garcia et al, 2020).…”

“…Therefore, children with DLD can benefit from additional support in learning L2/FL vocabulary. Secondly, even though children with DLD seem sensitive to cognate relations and perform better on L2 words having L1 cognates (Grasso et al, 2018; Kohnert et al, 2004; Payesteh and Pham, 2022; Tribushinina et al, 2023), there are also indications that positive L1 transfer may be less available to L2/FL learners with DLD than to typically-developing peers (Blom and Paradis, 2015; Tribushinina et al, 2020). Thirdly, evidence is accumulating that explicit metalinguistic interventions facilitate language production and comprehension in children with DLD (Balthazar et al, 2020; Ebbels, 2014).…”

“…Although the intervention was taught to all pupils (including pupils with hearing impairments), only children with DLD were included in the analyses reported below. The following research questions are addressed:RQ1: Do EFL learners with DLD perform better on Dutch-English cognates than on noncognates prior to the intervention?Based on the previous findings that children with DLD show a cognate advantage in vocabulary recognition tasks (Grasso et al, 2018; Kohnert et al, 2004; Tribushinina et al, 2023), we predicted that Dutch EFL learners should recognize more cognates than noncognates.RQ2: Does cognate recognition improve after the intervention?RQ2a: And if so, does improvement cover only treated cognates or also cognates not treated in the intervention?Bilingual children with DLD have been shown to respond well to cognate interventions in one-to-one sessions with a therapist (Dam et al, 2020; Kambanaros et al, 2017). Generalizing this finding to the classroom setting, we predicted that explicit attention to cognates and systematic discussion of differences and similarities between words in Dutch and English would allow pupils to develop cognate strategies and lead to vocabulary gains, above and beyond the words treated in the lessons.…”

“…Although there is plenty of research on the dual language development of children with DLD in naturalistic settings (Paradis et al, 2021), there is a dearth of research on how children with DLD cope with FL learning in regular classroom settings and how they can be supported in doing so. To the best of our knowledge, only four published studies have thus far examined FL learning success in children with DLD (Tribushinina et al, 2020, 2022, 2023; Zoutenbier and Zwitserlood, 2019). These studies indicate that primary-school children with DLD can make progress in EFL learning, even though their EFL skills develop slower than in typically-developing peers.…”