Bilingual Therapy Ideas

I like using books in my therapy sessions because there are many great stories waiting to be read. Reading is an excellent and fun way to increase children's vocabulary repertoires. Additionally, many language skills can be targeted using the same book. I have heard seasoned SLPs mention that they use the same book for a month, which sounds awesome! Using the same book lessens the amount of prep and the amount of time reading and rereading the book since the students will know the book very well by the second or third week. Books can be used to target character traits, figurative language, grammar, inferencing, rhyming, sequencing, story elements, story recall, vocabulary, and so much more. That being said, I also work with younger students whose dominant language is Chinese (my current caseload is mostly Mandarin Chinese). I find that I have to translate the books I read to Chinese most of the time, which isn't hard to do, but sometimes I do have difficulty translating specific words or phrases to Chinese on the spot. Another way to supplement books is to use videos. There are some story reading videos available on Youtube that are only a few minutes long and will not take too much screen time during sessions. There are many ways to use the videos, make it work for your sessions!

Some examples of story reading videos:

The Lion and the Mouse Fable

The very Hungry Caterpillar in Mandarin and English

The Very Hungry Caterpillar in Mandarin

L1 and L2 Phonologies

When comparing two languages, it is important to look at the speech sounds in both languages. There are shared sounds between Mandarin and English, but each language also has speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, that are unique to each language. As a result, a Mandarin speaker who is learning English may consistently make "errors" when producing words containing sounds that do not exist in Mandarin. For example, /f/ is a shared sound, but /v/ only exist in English. Mandarin speakers may have devoicing errors (/v/ is produced as /f/), omission errors (/v/ is not produced), among other errors.

Bilinguistics, as the name suggests, contains many great resources regarding bilingual speech-language pathology.

Speech pathologists working with Cantonese and Mandarin bilingual speakers may find the following pictures to be useful, courtesy of Bilinguistics.

Shared and unshared consonant phonemes in Cantonese and English.

Shared and unshared vowel phonemes in Cantonese and English.

Shared and unshared consonant phonemes in Mandarin and English.

Shared and unshared vowel phonemes in Mandarin and English.

For other languages, Bilinguistics developed a book that speech-language pathologists can refer to when evaluating the speech/language skills of children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.