Teaching foreign language grammar to primary-school children with developmental language disorder: A classroom-based intervention study

Introduction: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) start learning foreign languages, usually English as a foreign language (EFL), at an increasingly young age. However, current scholarship lacks crucial insights into how children with DLD respond to language learning in classroom settings and how they can be supported in doing so. The purpose of this early efficacy study is to determine whether a business-as-usual curriculum or a new teaching method tailored to the specific needs of pupils with DLD results in (greater) progress in the foreign language (English) and in the school language (Dutch).

Method: The participants were 75 pupils with DLD in the last three years of primary school, learning EFL in special education in the Netherlands. The intervention group (n=41) received 12 lessons following the CodeTaal approach, including metalinguistic instruction of grammar rules, explicit cross-linguistic contrasts and multimodal interaction with the material. The control group (n=34) received their regular English lessons. The study used a pre- to post-test design and compared the performance of the two groups on a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) in English and a narrative task in both English and Dutch.

Results: Only the intervention group significantly improved in their ability to identify ungrammaticalities in English and generalised the learnt rules to new sentences. Although the performance on the GJT predicted accuracy of English narratives, neither group showed a significant decrease of error rates in English. In contrast, the accuracy of Dutch narratives showed improvement, but only in the intervention group. However, the effects were small and there was significant variability in responsiveness to the intervention.

Conclusion: We conclude that pupils with DLD are able to make progress in foreign language learning in a classroom setting if provided with adequate support.