Photo credit: Johh-Morgan

It’s spring, which means it’s IEP season. My third one. Simply put, that means it’s time to get together with our special education team and discuss my children’s present level of performance in school, come up with annual goals for next year, and decide what special education services they will need. At the end of the process we will have an Individualized Education Program for each of them, a document that we will revisit periodically to check their progress.

This year is more complicated, and since I’m in the throes of it right now and it’s all I can think about, I’m posting about it here. This year, they will transition from preschool to kindergarten. Our previous IEP meetings have been relatively short, painless affairs with a few teachers and therapists we’ve gotten to know quite well after three years at the same school. At our meeting last week at the new kindergarten, there were no fewer than eight teachers and other professionals, only two of whom we knew. And it ended up being quite a marathon—we were there for three hours. On the one hand, it was wonderful meeting the people who will be working with our sons next year, and I’m honestly humbled that they all took so much time out of their day to hammer out the details of the IEP with us. On the other hand, it was also pretty intimidating.

Also, eligibility for special education services runs on a three-year cycle in our school district. So my boys have undergone a whole battery of tests and evaluations over the past month or two to determine their eligibility, and I’ve been collecting the reports as they come home and adding them to the pile. And obviously, the reports I awaited most eagerly, the ones I took out of their envelopes and read in the school parking lot before I even started the car, were the results of the bilingual speech and language evaluation.

Since my boys started attending a special education program, our lives have been full of tests and evaluations and results and percentiles. And though my boys’ strengths are outlined in their IEPs, they mostly address their “areas of need.” If you choose to dwell on those things, it can be dispiriting. So while the bilingual evaluation report included plenty of these, I hardly noticed them. Other phrases jumped out at me instead: Seemed to be equally bilingual in English and Spanish for receptive and expressive language. Was able to talk to this clinician in Spanish using complete, well-elaborated grammatical sentences. It was not necessary to use much English. There were a few informal language samples. It is so rare to get a professional’s objective opinion on their Spanish skills that I pored over every word. In the middle of such a stressful time, getting positive feedback about their Spanish was a nice boost.

My favorite part about the speech evaluation wasn’t included in the report, it was a story the wonderful Ms. E, Secondo’s speech therapist, shared with me later. She’s worked with him for two years now, and though she speaks some Spanish, she works with him exclusively in English. She was in the room while the bilingual speech pathologist was conducting the evaluation. At one point, a question was asked in Spanish and Secondo was silent. Ms. E gently prompted him by repeating the question, in Spanish.

“No,” my once severely speech-delayed son told her, looking her straight in the eye. “You. Speak. English.”

That is the story I keep coming back to when I’m overwhelmed by the percentiles and areas of need, when I need to remember how far my boys have come. It makes me smile even as I face that second IEP meeting tomorrow—even if it does last three hours.

Thank you,

Persis”

Dear Persis,

What you describe is very typical in bilingual development.  Research shows that children’s output is driven by their input.  Typically, if they hear one language more, they will use that language more.  We also know that children learn to understand before they speak, for the most part. It is a good sign that she appears to understand everything you say to her.

I haven’t met any 18-month-olds who can have “normal conversations” by my definition.  It is common that they have a set of words in one language and another set of words in their other language with a little bit of overlap. In fact, research shows that children her age who are raised in bilingual settings typically express 70% of their concepts in one language or the other and only 30% in both languages.

I encourage you to continue to use both languages with your daughter.  Before you know it, she will converse with you and your husband in English and Spanish.

Best,

Ellen Kester, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Ellen Stubbe Kester, Ph.D, CCS-LLP – A bilingual (English/Spanish) speech language professional who earned her Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from The University of Texas at Austin. She has provided bilingual Spanish/English speech-language services in schools, hospitals, and early intervention settings. Her research focus is on the acquisition of semantic language skills in bilingual children, with emphasis on assessment practices for the bilingual population. She is the President of Bilinguistics, which is “dedicated to enhancing speech and language services for Spanish-English bilingual children, enabling those children to achieve their highest communicative and academic potential.” You can read her answers here.

Yes, that´s right. We´ve hit the dreaded speech development wall.  My girl, Camila, turned 3 years old in August.  She´s been making sounds and talking up a storm as soon as she discovered she could. She has never been the calladita type.  She´s loud, full of energy and always has something to say.  Problem is, only a handful of people actually understand what she is saying.

She is up to speed with the amount of words in her bilingual repertoire and with the ability to construct sentences.  She also is really savvy at using the correct tenses and picks up new words very, very quickly.  Where she has a problem is in the clarity and pronunciation of her words.

Now, take a wild guess how many times I´ve been asked if it is due to her being bilingual?  I´ve stopped counting, it´s just not worth it.  And, it´s not coming from strangers or people who don´t know better.  The question has been raised within the confines of our ML@H household.  Yes, both my husband and I have questioned the fact that both of us only speak Spanish to her. I question it, but immediately dismiss it because I know better. If it wasn´t for the last two years of keeping up SpanglishBaby, reading our experts amazing advice, reading your stories and comments on our Forum and Facebook, plus researching for our Must Read articles I probably would have had falsely credited her bilingualism to her delay.

The fact is that this type of speech delay has been common in my family and my husbands.  Also, she has no problem distinguishing between Spanish and English words and using them when appropriate. Plus, her word count is where it needs to be.  If she was bilingual or not she would still have a speech clarity delay. Punto.

We go in for her first formal evaluation in three weeks.  I will let you know how it goes and what I continue to learn from this experience.  Stay tuned for a post in the coming weeks with expert advice on how to handle the perceived notion of bilingualism as the cause of speech delay.

Now, please tell me, has your bilingual child gone through speech therapy? How was the experience and what should I prepare myself, and Camila, for?  Thank you!!