Oral Language Development

Óscar seems to be a sequential bilingual student. Both of his parents speak to him in Spanish, and his step-father occasionally speaks to him in English. He began learning English through a Head Start bilingual preschool program. For a kindergartener, Óscar is very strong in his oral speaking in both Spanish and English. Since he spent the first few years of his life only hearing and speaking in Spanish with his parents, his oral language is more dominant in Spanish.

I video-recorded Óscar speaking in Spanish in our DLI classroom. We had a conversation about the things he enjoys doing at home with his family. In terms of linguistic complexity, Óscar understood all of my questions in Spanish and carried out fluent, detailed responses with a variety of sentence lengths. He used comprehensible and appropriate vocabulary to convey his ideas. With regards to language control, he had occasional grammatical errors (ie: "Entonces esa persona tiene que decir, -quién le gusta algo asqueroso?-" instead of, "A quién le gusta algo asqueroso?") He also explained a videogame and said the main characters "Estaban moridos" instead of "Estaban muertos." These errors may also simply be typical developmental errors for any five-year-old in his/her dominant language. Overall, I believe Óscar is at about a Level 4 ("Expanding") on the WIDA Speaking Rubric in Spanish.

In addition to recording his speaking abilities in Spanish, Óscar's Science teacher also recorded his oral language development in English. During the activity, students were experimenting with writing and coloring on different types of paper to see which ones were easier to write/color on. Óscar was excited about this "experiment" and had a lot to say about it! He appears to be developing (Level 3 on the WIDA Speaking Rubric) in his linguistic complexity, vocabulary usage, and language control. He understands questions and responds appropriately in English using both simple and expanded sentences. During the activity, he did not revert to Spanish; however, he did use some semantic expressions/false cognates (ie: "I'm gonna paint it" instead of "I'm going to color it"). All of his sentences were comprehensible and he has acquired quite a bit of informal language in English (ie: "gonna"). Occasionally, he made some syntactic errors (ie: "You have to paint it and see how it looks like") as well as semantic errors (ie: "This is a really tricky question-- you can't paint all of it so fast"). I know that Óscar understands and appropriately uses the word "pregunta" in Spanish, so it is interesting that he misused this same word in English. It is equally fascinating that he included the adjective "tricky" in his sentence-- here, he accurately describes the challenging task of coloring on corrugated cardboard!

Óscar appears to have a positive attitude towards speaking in both Spanish and English. He is very in-tune to the dominant languages of his peers and often accommodates for them by switching between English and Spanish. For example, if he has a question for an English-dominant peer, he will often ask him/her in English (and vice versa for Spanish-dominant peers). When speaking to me (his "Spanish" teacher), he only uses Spanish. When speaking to his "English" teachers, he only uses English. Óscar has many Spanish-dominant and English-dominant friends, and he interacts with all of them fairly equally.