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Thursday stream 4-6 Session 11.35 - 12.50 Length 25 minutes
John Everatt, Ian Smythe , Morag Hunter Carsch, Rosemary Sage , Mike Brooks, Usha Rogers and Shanti Chauhan
(1) University of Surrey (2) University of Leicester, (3) Leicester City Education Authority j.everatt@surrey.ac.uk
Abstract
Among the monolingual population several indicators may be used to identify those with communication, literacy and specific learning difficulties e.g. dyslexia. This study addresses the question of whether multi-lingual children who have difficulties acquiring literacy skills perform less well than matched mono-lingual controls on the cognitive profile. As around 30% of the school population in the city of Leicester have Gujerati as their home language, a Gujerati form of the assessment procedures has been developed and trialed in this collaborative project between the Universities of Surrey and Leicester, the Educational Psychologists, advisors, teachers in Leicester schools and members of the multi-lingual communities. Groups of multi-lingual (Gujerati/English) and monolingual (English) primary school children were selected on evidence of poor performance on measures of language ability. Selection procedures ensured that, as far as possible, variables such as non-verbal intelligence, age, school background, gender, language background, reading and spelling ability were controlled. The paper will report on the potential of the assessment procedures to profile effectively the underlying cognitive difficulties that may affect language acquistion in the multilingual child.
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