A Sociolinguistic Perspective of Language Proficiency of Limited English Proficient Students.

This study investigates the relationship between the relative language proficiency and the types of questions, as speech acts, produced by bilingual children in different settings and situations. The main premise of the study is that to study language proficiency of bilingual children, a holistic perspective should be used and the whole language repertoire in both languages and in different settings should be taken into account. The subjects of the study are six third grade students attending a self contained maintenance bilingual program in a midwest city. Video and audio taped data collected in the classroom, at home and in the park were coded and analyzed for the study. Tile data shows that children produce the same question repertoire previously found in English monolingual children and adults. Children asked more questions in the language they were more proficient. Certain types of questions appear only in children who were proficient in a language while other question types were characteristic of the speech of limited proficiency children. The use of question types was found to vary across classroom activities. It is suggested that further study of use of different speech acts, in relation to relative proficiency and within a sociolinguistic framework, will enhance the design of holistic models toward describing language behavior of bilingual children across settings and situations.