Improving language skills in bilingual children
Maja Roch
This paper aims to provide an overview and discussion of some recent interventions for improving the language skills of bilingual children who acquire Italian as L2. The peculiarity of the bilingual child’s language development is that the acquisition of the two languages must take place within the same time frame and with the same amount of resources as applicable for the linguistic development of monolingual children. Consequently, the demand for new intervention tools aimed at providing greater language stimulation for bilingual children is growing. In this paper, two intervention tools for language skills for pre-school bilingual children are presented. Parlaspesa is a tool developed for mobile devices and has the objective of facilitating the acquisition of new words. It is a tool which is particularly suitable for bilingual children in the early stages of the acquisition of Italian as L2. The second intervention is aimed at developing text comprehension and its components and is suitable for children aged 5 years and upwards and provides support for the development of relevant skills for later literacy learning.
Keywords
Language development, Bilingual children, Intervention on language abilities.