This past Saturday, I attended a conference at UBC on early Mandarin bi-lingual learning. It was a wonderful experience for me as I was able to catch up with some former colleagues and make new friends at the same time. The enthusiasm amongst the attendees was contagious and I was so glad that my friend, the Chief Administrator at Pui Ying Christian Services Society, Saintfield Wong, informed me about this conference and suggested that I attend.

As I listened to the parents, the academics, and the various stakeholders speak excitedly about the prospect of implementing early bilingual Mandarin learning in the Greater Vancouver area, I cannot help thinking about the assessment infrastructure that has to be in place for such a venture to work. We know that in the general population, 15-20% of the people will have some degree of a language-based learning disability. If that be the case, those involved in planning for an early Mandarin bi-lingual program should be prepared to deal with the 15-20% of the young children with some sort of a language-based learning disability who will be enrolled in the program. Early screening should be implemented to flag those children who are at-risk for having a language-based learning disability. If early identification and intervention is practiced, then the at-risk children will be better able to take advantage of a Mandarin bi-lingual learning opportunity.

In recent years, the study of reading difficulties in Chinese, Chinese dyslexia, is progressing in exciting ways. Researchers are attempting to understand the role of auditory and visual processing in Chinese dyslexia.

To me, learning a written language will always involve the ears and the eyes. This is why Kavanagh and Mattingly’s classic, Language by Ear and by Eye, is so valuable for us who are language teachers and researchers in the area of reading acquisition in children, no matter what language.

As a researcher, I find the prospect of having a large sample of bi-lingual children to study very exciting. I remember that a few years back, my paper on reading acquisition in Chinese was accepted initially for publication and then afterwards rejected based on one of the reviewer’s concern about the relatively small sample that I had in the study. If there is a critical mass of local children studying the Chinese written language and the English written language, then researchers should be able to have a convincing “n” for the purpose of publication.

One of my hopes is to be able to develop a relatively reliable and simple-to-use instrument for screening children who will likely develop reading problems in both English and Chinese. Predictors of English reading acquisition do exist and it is a matter of time that we will identify some fairly stable predictors for Chinese reading acquisition as well. Already, we have scholars such as McBride-Chang and Ho making significant progress in finding predictors of English and Chinese reading amongst Chinese children.

We live in an exciting time and Greater Vancouver is the place to be if you want to study Mandarin bi-lingual children.

Tags: Dyslexia, ESL
Posted in Blog