Bilingualism and False Diagnosis

 

In many countries bilingualism is a steadily growing phenomenon that shapes and affects the learning process of children at homes and schools. The most popular 2^nd languages in countries, such as, Egypt are English, French, and German. Many parents prefer their children to be schooled in a foreign language rather than their native mother tongue. Being fully bilingual is an important target in such environments because it is considered of value academically. Although becoming bilingual seems easy, living in a multilingual home or environment, however, it very much affects the learning process, may result in insufficient language skills, and can hinder the academic achievement. Landon suggested that bilingualism should be accommodated and recognized by the school in relation to culture and language to ensure literacy development in both languages if they were to apply inclusion of bilingual learners.

The early identification of reading difficulties that appears amongst bilingual and monolingual children makes it easier for facilitating the developmental process of reading skills acquisition and ensures the effectiveness of intervention. Later identification of reading difficulties in children may result in academic delays that influence the social and emotional status of children. Diagnosing a monolingual child with dyslexia is rather a complex matter, which in terms increases in bilingual children.

Predicting a learning difficulty and diagnosing it as dyslexia can be inconsistent if the school or the learning environment are not fit to accommodate bilingual learners and cannot meet assessment requirements. Administering assessment on a bilingual learner might be insufficient to detect signs of dyslexia because matters of language and culture need to be taken into consideration.

Collecting, gathering, and analyzing a bilingual learner’s background information are vital procedures that have to be done before administering any testing battery. This will help with the selection process of the assessment tools required for identifying a specific learning difficulty that a learner might be facing. The assessor should be familiar with both languages of the bilingual learner to obtain easy communication and to be able to translate parts of the assessment whenever the learner seems to be struggling due to language barrier.

To sum up, being able to detect and diagnose a learning difficulty in a bilingual learner’s second language can be a challenging procedure. Two common errors must be avoided: The first is to misdiagnose a certain learning difficulty that can be the outcome of a changing environment, or social and emotional status, such as, dyslexia which is called the false positive labeling. The second, is missing the manifestations of developmental dyslexia when present resulting in the failure of suggesting the proper intervention needed, which is called the false negative labeling.