What is bilingualism?

Bilingualism is defined as a speaker’s ability to use more than one language to communicate. For children growing up in bilingual environments, language acquisition is a dynamic journey influenced by the interaction of many differing linguistic inputs. Unlike monolingual children, who are exposed to a single linguistic system, bilinguals learn to differentiate between multiple languages and adapt their communication skills to diverse linguistic contexts. This process requires cognitive flexibility and a keen sensitivity to language cues from an early age.

Do Bilingual children acquire language in the same way that a monolingual child does?

Despite the complexity of bilingual language acquisition, research has shown that bilingual children typically achieve language milestones within a similar timeframe to their monolingual peers. From cooing and babbling in infancy to uttering their first words and eventually constructing complex sentences, bilinguals demonstrate a notable capacity for language learning and expression. Moreover, bilingual children often exhibit advanced metalinguistic awareness, allowing them to reflect on and manipulate language structures in both of their languages.

Code switching in Bilingualism

One of the defining features of bilingual language development is the ability to differentiate between and switch fluidly between languages. This is called code-switching. It is a natural and common phenomenon among bilinguals, serving various communicative functions and reflecting their linguistic versatility.

Challenges for Bilingual language development

Bilingual children may experience language mixing or blending, where elements of one language intrude into the other, particularly during the early stages of language acquisition. Additionally, bilingualism can sometimes be mistaken for language delay or disorder, highlighting the importance of accurate assessment and diagnosis by clinicians familiar with bilingual language development trajectories.

What can we do to help?

As caregivers, and speech pathologists, it is essential to provide bilingual children with a supportive and nurturing language-rich environment that promotes their language growth and development. Encouraging consistent exposure to both languages through meaningful interactions, storytelling, and culturally relevant activities can strengthen their language skills and promote balanced bilingualism. Moreover, valuing and affirming the child’s cultural and linguistic identity is of great importance in building positive self-esteem and a sense of belonging. 

Written by Anna Roy, Allied Health Assistant (Speech Pathology), at De Silva Kids Clinic.

The ability to regulate our emotions are an essential skill that contribute to a child’s wellbeing. They are important for coping with challenges, building healthy relationships, and building long-term success. Parents can play an important role in fostering emotion regulation skills in their children.

Help your child build emotional literacy skills

Support your child to understand and identify different emotions in themselves and others. Emotional literacy requires someone to have the language to name different emotions. Parents can support this by:

• Drawing attention to character’s emotions when reading books together
• Pointing out and labelling emotions of people and characters in movies and TV shows
• Reflecting back the emotion they see their child experiencing in the moment
• Helping their child label emotions they see other people experience at home, in the park, at kindergarten/school

Support emotional awareness

Provide a safe space for open communication about emotions at home. Make this a judgement-free zone where all emotions are “ok”, as long as our actions are safe. Use age-appropriate language to help your child express what emotion they are feeling in the moment. Clarify with your child what they have said, to ensure they feel understood. Validating and normalizing feeling different emotions helps support wellbeing for children.

Model healthy emotional expression

Model how you identify and express your own emotions across the day. Children benefit from watching how others discuss and cope with strong emotions in healthy ways. It is important not only to do this for positive emotions, but also uncomfortable ones. Consider sharing when you feel worried, frustrated, or disappointed, and verbalise which strategies you use to cope with these feelings.

Teach problem-solving skills

Help your child to develop a toolbox of problem-solving skills that they can use when they encounter difficult situations:

• Brainstorming possible solutions and picking the best one for the problem
• Writing a pros and cons list
• Forecasting the consequences for future actions
• Taking the perspective of other people involved

Develop a set of calming strategies

Help your child figure out which types of activities help them feel calm when their body and mind is dysregulated. Examples could include:

• Talking to someone about the problem
• Going for a walk, riding a bike, or
• Creative expression of feelings (draw or paint the feeling)
• Mindfulness relaxation exercises
• A healthy distraction (e.g. favourite movie, time with friends/family).

Written by Alex Felix-Faure, Senior Psychologist at De Silva Kids Clinic.

Our senses are the gateways to the world, allowing us to perceive and interact with the environment in intricate ways. It is important that parents/guardians, clinicians, and teachers have an understanding of a child’s sensory patterns and furthermore, their needs!

We have many different sensory systems, these include;

Tactile which interprets sensations related to touch, pressure, temperature, and pain.

The vestibular sense contributes to our sense of balance, spatial orientation, and coordination of movements. Our auditory system which doesn’t only enables us to hear but also plays a crucial role in our ability to communicate.

Our visual sense enables us to perceive and interpret the world through the sense of sight.

The olfactory sense detects and identify various smells in our environment, influencing our perceptions, memories, and even emotions.

Lastly is proprioception which is the ability to perceive the position, movement, and orientation of our body parts without relying on visual or auditory input.

An important topic that goes hand in hand with a child’s sensations is self-regulation. Self-regulation is the ability to understand and manage behaviour and your reactions to feelings and things happening around you. It includes being able to: regulate reactions to strong emotions like frustration, excitement, anger and embarrassment. To have the ability to calm down after something exciting or upsetting has occurred. For some children, some environments such as school or the shops can be an overstimulating and therefore an overwhelming environment.

There are different categories to a child’s sensory patterns (Winnie Dunn, 2007).

Seeking: a Seeker is one who has a high threshold to sensations. Seekers enjoy sensation, and they really want more sensation and do things to get more. These are ways people add more sensation to their everyday experiences. Activities seekers may enjoy new textures such as slime, music and colours.

Avoiding: Avoiders have low thresholds. In comparison to seekers avoiders try to get less sensory input. Their brains are geared to detect a lot of input, but they have low thresholds, so every piece of input is potentially seen as harmful or threatening. The less unpredictable input they get, the better they feel. Avoiders can thrive of routine and order and limited surprises.

Sensitivity: Sensitivity is also a low sensory threshold like avoiding. People with sensitivity try to participate, but then they get overwhelmed. They try to do things to keep it to a minimum, but they are in the game participating so sometimes they get overwhelmed. Their brain is trying to take the stuff in, but their low sensory thresholds are flooding them.  Sometimes people with sensitivity can feel overwhelmed or bossy because they are trying to navigate and participate as much as they can.

Registration: Registration shares high thresholds with seekers, but they have a passive self-regulation strategy letting things happen to them then reacting accordingly.

Through observation and assessment, a child’s sensory needs can be uncovered. From this, the necessary interventions can be put in place to better support your child’s needs.

Written by Lucy Nolan, Allied Health Assistant at De Silva Kids Clinic.

Play for children isn’t a simple pass time, but an important part of their physical, emotional, and cognitive development. It allows them to develop skills about cause and effect, builds on social skills, confidence, creativity, coordination and balance, and allows them to explore feelings and emotions as well as build resistance and coping strategies for challenging situations.

Unstructured free play allows children to create their own story with challenges and uncertainty that is typically unattainable thorough structured play with adults.

As children get older they start to participate in cooperative pretend play which allows children to role play and act out scenarios, learning to negotiate, cooperate, and communicate with others. They may take on different roles and make decisions that help express their emotions, fears, and desires in a safe and non-threatening environment. This type of play with others builds resilience, helps process complex emotions and promotes emotional intelligence.

These milestones are general guidelines, and individual children may progress at their own pace.

Need some ideas for things to use for unstructured free play? Try the following:

• Cardboard boxes
• Blankets & Pillows
• Chalk
• Playdough or putty
• Wooden spoons
• Sticks

Written by Jade Oakes, Allied Health Assistant at De Silva Kids Clinic.

You may ask yourself, “Well, what does it mean to create an environment that is rich in language?”. Let us unpack this with another question. What is language? Language is more than words. It is a socially shared system that goes beyond words. It is adaptive, generative, and multimodal. Think about it. If you were to search “new words in the dictionary 2023”, a list of words would appear. How else can we stay up to date with all these new words that kids are using these days? Otherwise, we would be termed pretty cringey when we use these new slangs incorrectly. You see what I did there?

Language is the core of social communication. We attribute meaning to what is communicated. But this meaning is arbitrary. It is learnt. It is conventionalised. You need to learn the pairing of the language used and its meaning to effectively understand it and use it. For example, when I say the word “apple”. How do you know what it is that I am referring to? Well, it is because you have learnt and seen what this object is. You know that it can be red, green, or pink, that it is a fruit and so on. You had to learn this word in order to be able to use it and understand it. Without language, how would we be able to do all things important? How would I be able to order my morning coffee if I could not effectively use language to communicate? Or if you did not know what the word coffee means! For all my coffee lovers, let me answer this for you, IT WOULD BE DISASTROUS!

Even the ability to understand words from other languages work under this learning principle. I have an Eastern European background but was born here in Australia. How did I become bilingual? I was exposed to both languages in an environment that was rich with language. I was able to hear words used in context which allowed me to extract their meanings.

Like I said previously. This learning is not limited to the learning of words. Sign language (e.g., Auslan) and other forms of gestural communication (e.g., Key Word Sign) are inclusive of this concept. Their beautifully intricate and specific hand, finger and arm movements all work to hold meaning. Without having this shared understanding, its functionality and effectiveness would crumble, and so would spoken language.  

Regardless of whether you use spoken language or gestural communication or even a combination of both, it would become frustrating if the way we communicated was not understood by a listener. For example, children who are non-verbal are more likely to become frustrated because their means of communicating through sounds alone, is not understood by the listener.

We can foster our children’s language development through providing a language rich environment. This can be done in the following ways:

1. Let the child lead you: When you are engaging in play with your child, let them be in control. I am not saying that you should let them make a mess of the house just because they are “in control”. What I mean is for you to let them lead you during play. You are still the parent/ guardian. Getting them to brush away their morning breath or to put their dishes in the sink are still important routines that you as a parent/guardian need to keep implementing. These routines in themselves offer great language exposure to a wide variety of words that they get to here repeatedly! After all, this is what we want. We want repetition.

But, with regards to play, let your child guide you and show you what they enjoy. If they continuously want to engage with the same toy, then let them! Again, language exposure is all about repetition. So, the activity being used to promote development is not confined to one specific way where it constantly needs to be different. It may seem tedious when the activity and the words being used are repetitive, but this is the best exposure. Singing nursery rhymes such as Twinkle, twinkle little star or Old McDonald are all repetitive and follow a pattern. But how did you learn these songs? Through repetition. So, when exposing your child to the same words, and pairing it with the correct object or action, this increases their awareness that words hold meaning and will begin to build their understanding.

2. Use of Key Word Sign (KWS) alongside spoken language: Using both forms of communication is an extremely effective way of enhancing a child’s exposure to language. It provides non-verbal children a means to communicate when spoken language is still developing. It reduces communication related frustrations as the child is still able to request and communicate their wants and needs through KWS. But this strategy is not limited for children who are non-verbal. Typically developing children can also be exposed to and use this form of communication. It is similar to being exposed to a second language. KWS is like another language, just it involves gestures. So, what is the harm of teaching children another language?

3. Provide time/ Pause to encourage responses: This strategy provides children with the opportunity to have an attempt at saying a word or sound. Like I said previously, repetition is always key. Ideally, provide a 5 – 10 second pause to allow the child time to respond. If the child does not, that is ok! They are still learning. In this instance, then you would complete the ending to provide the child the full sentence or phrase. For example:

• Ready – Set (Pause) Go!
• What colour is this ball? (Pause) Blue. The ball is blue.

The below link shows an amazing example of what repetition can do and how pausing is so powerful!

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=913688659422590

4. Parallel talk AND Self-talk: These techniques help to model language. By this I mean that they help children to put names to objects, feelings and sounds while also providing early exposure to the grammatical correctness of how words are used to form sentences. Examples include the following:

• Parallel Talk: Talking about what THE CHILD is doing, hearing, seeing, or feeling.
  • Examples:
    • “You are drawing”.
    • “The sun is yellow”.
    • “You are brushing your hair”.
    • “Push the boat”
    • “You are wet”.

• Self-Talk: Talking about what YOU are doing, hearing, seeing, or feeling.
  • Examples:
    • “I am cooking”.
    • “I am drinking water”.
    • “I am putting apples in the bag”.

The bottom line is that language provides us with the opportunity to imitate, interact, listen, and respond with intention. It is not just defined as the words that we use, but also the connections and exposures required to help shape its use in a way that is understood by others (i.e., verbally and/or gesturally). Therefore, it is important to maximise the ways that we provide children with the opportunity to hear, contribute and respond to language.

Written by Natalie Pavlovska, Allied Health Assistant at De Silva Kids Clinic. 

For some parents, mornings with children can be extremely stressful as children often run on their own clock. Morning routines can include many tasks. When you ask your children to complete certain tasks, do they fully understand your expectations? It is important to explain to your child what your expectations are. For example, “John, get dressed”. Do you mean to put on a shirt, shorts, socks and shoes OR just a shirt and pants OR just pants? Explain exactly what you mean and show them how to do it. For example:

Parents, I encourage you to ‘set the stage’ for the morning routine. Help make mornings less stressful for not only your children BUT also yourself!

Other suggestions include:

• Checklist: Write down tasks as a checklist that your child can tick off once completed

• Reward System: Rewards are one of the most consistent ways to change behaviour and build desired responses. Children often need their rewards immediately after the desired behaviour is exhibited (i.e. completing routine). Examples of immediate rewards, in the car on the way to school, include
  • Snack of choice (e.g. cookie, 3 lollies)
  • Verbal praise (e.g. give me a hi-5)
  • Sticker
  • Small toy (e.g. dinosaur)

• Plan Night before: Encourage your child to complete as many tasks as possible the night before. For example, homework, signed papers, lunch money and pack school supplies. How about identifying a specified area near the door to place their bags ready to be picked up before leaving, or laying out the outfits on the couch to wear the next day!

• Limit electronics – A smooth morning routine means unnecessary distractions, including iPod, television, phone, iPad etc. Set your limits “John, 10 minutes on phone”

Remember … these simple ideas may help you get out the door quickly, but some mornings may run more smoothly than others. So, pick a few strategies on different days and it’s all a matter of trial and error.

Written by Didem Karademir, Speech Pathologist.

What is joint attention?

Joint attention is when two people attend to each other or to the same thing. For example, when the adult talks about an object or item (e.g. ‘apple’) and the child engage and looks at the item.

Why is joint attention important?

Joint attention is important to sustain attention, engage in social interactions and develop language skills. In typically developing children, by the age of 3 years, children are able to gain and maintain joint attention from adults and peers. Joint attention is an important social skill that allows children to engage and see another person’s point of view. Children with autism may experience difficulty with joint attention.

How you can help improve joint attention:

– Make sure your child is attending to you before speaking to them. Cue them by calling their name and position yourself so you are face to face prior to talking to them. You can also gently tap their shoulders to cue them. Make sure you are at eye level rather than standing and talking to them while they are on the floor.

– Reduce external distractions such as turning off the TV or moving to a quiet place.

– Create exciting opportunities for your child by changing your voice or adding gestures.

– Follow your child’s lead (e.g. allow your child to choose an activity).

– Praise your child when he/she attends to an object/item (e.g. Good job! You popped that bubble).

Activities to improve joint attention:

– Joint attention can be integrated into your everyday routine (i.e. brushing teeth, bath time, meal time).

– Reading storybooks together and discussing the pictures (e.g. setting, characters) and story.

– Cause and effect games (e.g. bubbles, pop up pirates)

– Nursery Rhymes

– Back and forth interactions (e.g. rolling a ball, singing songs etc.) and exaggerating facial expressions and comments (e.g. open your mouth wide open, rise

If your child has difficulties with joint attention, language skills and/or communication, please see a Speech Pathologist or Occupational Therapist so that she/he can be assessed and suitable therapy goals can be established

Written by Senali Alahakone, Speech Therapist at De Silva Kids Clinic

Every child loves bubbles. In our speech therapy sessions, bubbles are one of our favourite tools.

Here are a few ways you can use bubbles to develop language and speech:

Eye contact – Bubbles are a great way to increase eye contact by allowing the child to look at you in anticipation before you blow bubbles.

Speech – If your child has speech errors or require support with developing sounds, you can use bubbles to teach a sound such as /m/ for ‘more’ bubbles, /b/ for ‘bubbles’, /p/ for ‘pop’

Requesting – You can use bubbles to request by allowing the child to ask for ‘help’ when they need the lid of the bubble opened or when requesting for the adult to ‘blow’ the bubbles.

Vocabulary – Increase your child’s vocabulary bank by exposing him/her to many words such as:

· Nouns: bubbles, lid, fingers

· Describing words: big, little, small, giant, wet, tiny, fun

· Locations: up, down, on, under

· Actions: pop, gone, look, stomp/stamp, kick, find

· Questions: where, who’s turn

· Social: please, more

Turn-taking – Teach turn-taking by allowing your child to blow bubbles and then allowing him to wait his turn while you blow bubbles. Turn-taking skills are important for a child to learn for later conversational turn-taking.

Motivation – If you are working on a particular skill, you can use bubbles to increase motivation by allowing him to pop or blow bubbles at the end of each activity or after each turn.

Phrases – Bubbles can help increase phrase length:

· 2 word phrases – ‘more bubbles’, ‘bubbles up’, ‘blow bubbles’

· 3 word phrases – ‘more bubbles please’, ‘blow big bubbles’, ‘I want bubbles’, ‘bubbles go pop’

Written by Senali Alahakone – Speech Pathologist at DSKC.

Understanding the Functions of Challenging Behaviours…

Children can demonstrate challenging behaviours at home, school, or in the community. At times, these challenging behaviours such as aggression (physical and verbal), absconding, non-compliance, avoidance, etc. can be frustrating for all those who work and interact with the child. Before we can manage these behaviours, it is extremely important that we determine the FUNCTION of the behaviour. The function of the behaviour helps us to better understand WHY the behaviour is occurring. All behaviours have a function. The behaviour itself, although challenging, serves to communicate this function.

There are 4 possible functions of children’s behaviour:

FUNCTION 1: ESCAPE – “I don’t want to do this!”

• Difficult tasks
• Prolonged work
• Social demands
• Being in a certain place
• Being with a certain person

FUNCTION 2: ATTENTION – “I want attention!”

• From parents
• From teachers
• From peers
• From siblings
• From anyone!

FUNCTION 3: TO GAIN ACCESS – “I want this!”

• A toy
• An object
• Food/treats
• An activity
• A privilege

FUNCTION 4: AUTOMATICALLY REWARDING – “I like doing this!”

• It feels good
• It looks good
• It sounds good
• It tastes good
• It’s a habit

To ascertain the function of a child’s behaviour it is important to first observe and collect lots of data about the behaviour. Through this, patterns begin to emerge and the function becomes more clear.

Written by Marisa Donnoli – Psychologist at De Silva Kids Clinic.