Definitions and Definite Noun Phrases: Indicators of Children's Decontextualized Language Skills

Decontextualized language skills (the use of complex syntax, explicit lexical reference and revision, establishing rather than assuming shared knowledge, etc.) may be critical to children's success at literacy tasks, at formal second language learning, and perhaps at school learning in general. The relation of decontextualized language skills to conversational, face-to-face skills, or to the communicative adequacy of children's messages, however, remains unclear. The performance of bilingual children on two language tasks in both the children's languages was assessed, in order to determine whether the profile of skills in the first language was replicated in the second language. Nineteen children whose primary language was either English or French but who had developed a competency in the alternate language through attendance at a French-English bilingual school were assessed in both languages on their ability to use explicit reference within a picture description task and to give formal noun definitions. The age of the children, 6–11 in grades 1–5, allowed a developmental view of the tasks within each language, in addition to the cross-language comparisons. High cross-language, within-task correlations supported the hypothesis that children's skills at decontextualized language tasks are stable across stronger and weaker languages. Implications for instruction of monolingual and bilingual children in literacy are discussed.