Happy National Adoption Month! Adopting a child is a momentous occasion in the life of a family and parents are eager to support development in any way possible.
Language Learning Concerns
The process of learning the language of an adoptive family is unique from most cases of learning a foreign language because very often, the child does not retain any knowledge of his or her native language.
The challenge is identifying when a child may be struggling with learning words and phrases in English because of some underlying difficulty with his or her ability to learn any language.
Articulation Disorder or Second Language Learning?
Children not only need to learn the vocabulary and sentence structure of the adoptive family’s language, but also need to learn correct pronunciation of all the phonemes of that language as well.
In fact, in most cases, children acquire the sound system of the new language very quickly.
Summary
Kids who are internationally adopted can acquire English rapidly after arriving to live with their adoptive family, with little long term impact of their native language on their English development.
When in doubt, close monitoring and comparison to trends noted in research can help to make decisions about when to intervene.
Conclusion
The guidelines listed above are a short summary of findings from numerous researchers attempting to improve the accuracy of our early screening and evaluation efforts so that kids are not waiting to initiate services because we expect them to 'catch up' eventually.