Bilingual Children With Specific Language Impairment, Article Critique Example

Theoretical and applied issues

The article is all about bilingual children who have developed Specific Language Impairment (SLI). It addresses the implied and theoretical debates with respect to two research studies that compare the morphological acquisition of French-English bilingual children to French and English monolingual, both with SLI.

Researches reveal that children with SLI have a typical social-emotional development, unique hearing and speech abilities, and higher IQs. They, however, have language abilities below their age expectation, as language development delayed. The acquisition sequence of grammatical morphemes and tense making acquired later. SLI Children show a 4-year gap in their mastery of plurals and third person. English speakers SLI children, aged between five and eight show lower accuracy in tense making morphemes thus lowering their language production. Their age peers not affected; they have an unnoticeable gap in accuracy with tense versus non-tense morphology. In a language test, the TD monolinguals score highly in tense and non-tense morphemes, while the monolingual and bilingual children with SLI have lower scores.

The theoretical implications have it that bilinguals and monolinguals with SLI acquire grammatical morphology at the same rates and patterns. Affected children the same age, whether bilingual or monolingual, have the same levels of accuracy with each morpheme group or individual morpheme. The applied implications imply that children affected with SLI, raised bilingual without serious detriment to their grammatical development.

Article critique

First sight of the paper brings in confusion, as one cannot tell the beginning of the whole article. The writer then introduces the topic with a, long confusing, sentence: Bilingualism “as often” taken as an inappropriate development…by learning two linguistic systems. The term “is often” is unacceptable in describing something, as it shows that other possible definitions of the term exist. All the same, the actual definition of the term bilingualism are 1) the ability to speak two languages. The issue on whether bilingualism contributes to Specific Language Impairment (SLI) or not is stills a mystery.

The writer breaches various referencing rules: for example, in the third paragraph, the writer puts it that: (For more information on SLI, see Leonard, 1998.) This form of referencing is inapplicable for any referencing style. There is the use of exceptionally long sentences consisting of more than forty words in several occasions e.g. Page three; “There is a group of explanatory accounts … Leonard, & Tomblin, 2001). This and other wordy and needs splitting into smaller sentences. The writer uses passive voice in most of the work brings in ambiguous work with many grammatical errors.

The whole paper mixed- up as one cannot tell the title from the subtitle. The statistical data and figures spread all over in the article. The whole project needs splitting into the research paper subtitles: a clear introduction that informs the reader of the topic, a detailed body with clear topics and subtopics. This followed by a strong conclusion that summarizes everything discussed in the essay. The second paragraph of the conclusion does not make sense all. An acknowledgement should have appeared at the beginning and not as a conclusion. The footnote that follows is also not a standard one as footnotes are short review sentences at the end of every page. The article is more of a draft than a final presentation.