Written by Dr. Helen Chaset, Director of Professional Development
We were fortunate to have an internationally recognized expert on language acquisition visit us April 29 for this week’s professional development session. A professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, Dr. Erika Hoff stPublishudies early monolingual and bilingual development and its relation to properties of children’s language exposure. Dr. Hoff presented her recent research Input and Language Development in Bilingually Developing Children, which focuses on bilingual children and the variability in their language skills. Following her presentation, faculty discussed implications for optimizing our students' dual and triple language development.
Some key points made during Dr. Hoff's presentation were:
- We must be sensitive to the difficulty of learning two languages simultaneously.
- The volume of language for bilingual and multilingual learners is GREATER than for those children learning only one language.
- There is little value to non-native speakers of English speaking English at home; whereas there is value in continuing to develop the native language at home.
- It takes 4-7 years to develop academic proficiency in a new language.
- Multi-lingual learners and adults deserve a great amount of respect for being able to communicate in more than one language.
- Multiple sources of high quality input from native speakers of English aids significantly in language development.
Dr. Hoff is the author of numerous scientific articles in the field of child language and Language Development. She edited Research Methods in Child Language: A Practical Guide, the Blackwell Handbook of Language Development and Childhood Bilingualism: Research on Infancy through School Age. Her lecture has been followed by a great deal of discussion and thoughtful dialogue among educators. As a learning community, we are reflecting and eager to carry on this conversation so we may continue to do our best to fulfill our children’s learning needs.
