A Narrative Approach to Synthesizing Research on Vietnamese Bilingual and Monolingual Children

Abstract

Purpose: This review article offers a narrativized synthesis of my research over the past 15+ years with Vietnamese-speaking children based on data collected from individual bilingual and monolingual children in preschool and elementary schools.

Method: I begin with a positionality narrative to describe who I am in relation to the research conducted. I provide an overview of the research program including tool building and how my research with bilinguals in the United States led me to international collaborations in Vietnam.

Results: I present main findings from this body of work in three areas: typical bilingual development, reading performance in Vietnam, and characteristics of developmental language disorder in the Vietnamese language. Implications within each area are discussed in terms of clinical application and future research directions. Practitioners and researchers alike can freely access the Vietnamese assessment tools created and validated to date from our website, https://vietslp.sdsu.edu/.

Conclusions: This research overview aims to offer clinicians and researchers the sociocultural context for understanding the relevance of this body of research. It also serves as an invitation for new generations of scholars, particularly scholars of color, to see their own unique positionings and perspectives as valuable and necessary for scientific innovation and progress.

Presentation video: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23929491.

Figure 1.

Picture naming accuracy in Vietnamese (blue) and English (orange) of 33 bilinguals who completed a longitudinal study from kindergarten through third grade. The figure includes group-level growth trajectories (left) and individual participant trajectories (right). Group-level performance was reported in Pham and Kohnert (2014). Individual trajectories for each language were originally reported in Pham (2011) and have been combined in this figure.

Figure 2.

This figure is reprinted from Dam, Pham, Potapova, et al. (2020) to show the subordination index (SI) of Vietnamese (left) and English (right) based on a cross-sectional sample of 89 bilinguals, ages 3–8 years. SI is calculated as the total number of clauses divided by the total number of utterances (Miller & Iglesias, 2012). An SI of 1 means that a child's average utterance consists of one main clause. SI values that are greater than 1 indicate more use of complex utterances that have more than one clause. SI values smaller than 1 reflect the use of fragments or utterances of less than one clause. SI was associated with age in each language, though the strength of these associations differed by language. Using R² as the effect size, 14% of the variance in Vietnamese SI can be attributed to age, whereas 42% of the variance in English SI can be attributed to age.