Effective vocabulary interventions for children with hearing loss, including children who are bilingual, are needed because of persistent vocabulary deficits in this population. Current instructional practices for children with hearing loss who are bilingual vary in the degree to which they incorporate the language the child uses at home. Unfortunately, there is little direct evidence as to whether bilingual or monolingual instructional practices yield greater benefits for these children. Three Spanish-English-speaking children participated in this single case adapted alternating treatments design study that evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of bilingual and monolingual teaching procedures for an expressive vocabulary intervention. Contrary to predictions from a monolingual instruction perspective, no evidence of an inhibitory effect of bilingual instruction on English performance was identified. Participants exhibited gains in Spanish for words in the bilingual condition only. Findings suggest more efficient word learning in the bilingual condition as measured by conceptual vocabulary.

Introduction: Syntactic awareness is a metalinguistic ability defined as the child’s ability to reflect on formal processes relating to the organization of words in sentences and to manipulate them. This skill is still little explored in the context of school learning, and its importance in the school learning process of Portuguese-speaking children is poorly described. Objective: To compare written narrative between children with and without difficulty in syntactic awareness. Methods: The study was conducted on 60 children (mean age 9.4 years; SD: 0.9) enrolled in the 4th and 5th years of elementary school in a municipal school. The subjects were divided into two groups according to their performance in the task of syntactic awareness - G1 (children with medium/high performance in syntactic awareness) and G2 (lower performance). After the assessment of syntactic awareness each child elaborated a written narrative text based on a stimulus figure. This text was analyzed by judges in terms of spelling, grammatical errors, use of grammatical classes, and content. The Student t-test (α = 0.05) was used to compare the groups. Results: G2 children showed altered handwriting; greater occurrence of spelling mistakes, mainly of irregular phonographic relation type; oral support and difficulty with nasal markers; short texts with preference for the use of nouns and verbs, as well as difficulties with text structuring, use of punctuation and vocabulary, while G1 used more verbs and pronouns instead of nouns. Conclusions: Children with adequate syntactic awareness were able to elaborate written narratives with greater competence, demonstrating acquisition of orthographic aspects and development of textual coherence.