The development of communicative and language proficiency in Maltese and English of five minority language speaking children living in Malta

Abstract

An increase in international legal migration to Malta in recent years has resulted in growing numbers of minority language speaking children (MLSC) learning the host languages (HtLs) English and Maltese. However, to the researcher’s knowledge, limited research is available on the sociodemographic background of the MLSC population in Malta, and on their development of the HtLs. Through the use of case studies, this study aimed to explore in detail the language background and sociodemographic characteristics of five MLSC residing in Malta and attending preschool or school in Malta. Furthermore, the study aimed to evaluate the five children’s progress in vocabulary skills and narrative re-telling in the HtLs over a year. Parent report was used to collect sociodemographic and language background information. A semi-structured parent interview and a set of vocabulary checklists for parents based on Cross-Linguistic Tasks from the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings test battery (LITMUS-CLT) were conducted. Direct assessment of the children’s vocabulary and narrative re-telling skills was conducted using the LITMUS-CLT vocabulary tasks in English and Maltese, and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) respectively. A nonword repetition test (NWRT) and the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM) were administered to exclude possible influence of language processing difficulties and limitations in nonverbal intelligence influencing language performance amongst the five participants. Insight into the children’s language background and sociodemographic characteristics indicates that the factors of age of acquisition (AoA) and the amount of language exposure in each language played a large role in promoting proficiency in the HtLs amongst these five children. However, the results also indicate that further insight into the child’s HtL input outside the home and by a rater proficient in the HtLs is recommendable. Progress was generally observed with regards to the children’s skills in Maltese and English noun and verb comprehension and expression, and parents were found to under-report their children’s proficiency in Maltese and over-report their English proficiency. Proficiency in narrative re-telling was observed to improve for English across all five children but they consistently did not re-tell the narrative in Maltese. These findings indicate that it is recommendable for future studies to explore factors which may possibly be impeding the development of narrative proficiency in Maltese. The study findings may also serve as a springboard for future researchers to explore trends in vocabulary acquisition, narrative development and NWR amongst the MLSC in Malta, with the aim of establishing clinical norms which would aid the identification of MLSC possibly struggling with developmental language disorder (DLD).