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IntroductionOne of the bilingual advantages often reported in the literature on typically-developing children involves advantages in foreign language learning at school. However, it is unknown whether similar advantages hold for bilingual pupils with learning disabilities. In this study, we compare the performance of monolingual and bilingual primary-school children with developmental language disorder (DLD) learning English as a school subject in special education schools in the Netherlands.MethodsThe participants were monolingual (N = 49) and bilingual (N = 22) children with DLD attending Grade 4−6 of special education (age 9–12). The bilingual participants spoke a variety of home languages. The English tests included a vocabulary task, a grammar test and a grammaticality judgement task. The Litmus Sentence Repetition Task and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test were used as measures of, respectively, grammatical ability and vocabulary size in Dutch (majority/school language). In addition, samples of semi-spontaneous speech were elicited in both English and Dutch using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. The narratives were analysed for fluency, grammatical accuracy, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity. A questionnaire was used to measure amount of exposure to English outside of the classroom.Results and discussionThe results for Dutch revealed no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals on the narrative measures, but monolinguals performed significantly better on both vocabulary and grammar. In contrast, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on all English measures, except grammatical accuracy of narratives. However, some of the differences became non-significant once we controlled for amount of out-of-school exposure to English. This is the first study to demonstrate that foreign language learning advantages extend to bilingual children with DLD. The results also underline the need to control for differences in out-of-school exposure to English when comparing bilingual and monolingual pupils on foreign language outcomes.

This paper studies the acquisition of Russian pronominal gender by Dutch-Russian simultaneous bilinguals (4;3-7;11) growing up in the Netherlands. The performance of the bilingual group is compared to that of age-matched monolinguals with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). We hypothesize that reduced exposure to Russian in the minority-language context may lead to delays in language development, comparable to problems attested in DLD (in this case due to reduced intake). The results of a narrative elicitation task demonstrate that both monolingual groups performed at ceiling from age 4 onwards. Monolingual children with DLD were as accurate at using pronominal gender as their unimpaired peers from the earliest ages studied, which supports the processing accounts of DLD taking morphological richness of the target language into account. In contrast, 4-year-old bilinguals performed around chance level. The performance of the bilingual group improved with age and reached the monolingual level only by age 7. The results suggest that reduced input has more impact on the acquisition of gender in a morphologically rich language, whereas the possible effects of DLD are no longer visible after age 3.

It has been established that in the Netherlands, as in other countries, a majority of students do not attain the desired level of writing skills at the end of elementary school. Time devoted to writing is limited, and only a minority of schools succeed in effectively teaching writing. An improvement in the way writing is taught in elementary school is clearly required. In order to identify effective instructional practices we conducted a meta-analysis of writing intervention studies aimed at grade 4 to 6 in a regular school setting. Average effect sizes were calculated for ten intervention categories: strategy instruction, text structure instruction, pre-writing activities, peer assistance, grammar instruction, feedback, evaluation, process approach, goal setting, and revision. Five of these categories yielded statistically significant results. Pairwise comparison of these categories revealed that goal setting (ES = 2.03) is the most effective intervention to improve students’ writing performance, followed by strategy instruction (ES = .96), text structure instruction (ES = .76), peer assistance (ES = .59), and feedback (ES = .88) respectively. Further research is needed to examine how these interventions can be implemented effectively in classrooms to improve elementary students’ writing performance.

Connectives such as "because" and "but" are crucial for signaling coherence relations in discourse. They contribute to a better reading comprehension and, thus, academic performance. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of connective development during teenage years by studying individual differences in the performance of native Russian-speaking teenagers (N = 107, M[subscript age] = 13.93, range: 11 to 17) in a connective-cloze task. The tested connectives marked six coherence relations and were used either predominantly in speech or in the written language. In addition, we examined whether students' performance with the connectives was modulated by their general linguistic experience, as assessed by a vocabulary test and degree of exposure to print. Our results reveal that interpersonal differences in lexicon size and level of exposure to print were the strongest predictors of appropriate usage of connectives, whereas differences in age, connective mode, and polyfunctionality played a lesser role. This finding may indicate that, starting from age 11, biological age and intrinsic properties of connectives matter less for their mastery than general linguistic experience, as measured by vocabulary level and exposure to print.