The French English Discourse Study – Canada (FrEnDS-CAN)

The French English Discourse Study – Canada (FrEnDS-CAN) is a multisite research project lead by a consortium of researchers from a number of Canadian universities. The project examined the development of discourse skills in mono- and bilingual children between the ages of 7 and 12. Discourse samples were collected from monolingual French, monolingual English, and bilingual French and English-speaking children. In addition, samples were collected from children who spoke Arabic as their home language. Three discourse contexts were included, conversational, narrative (story telling) and expository (description of favorite game or sport).
There were two main objectives for the study: 1) to increase our understanding of monolingual and bilingual development by analyzing the impacts of language status (mono-/bilingual) and discourse type on various aspects of language development at the word, sentence and discourse structure levels and 2) to improve our ability to identify language disabilities in monolingual and bilingual children through the development of normative information and the creation of databases of language samples in the three discourse contexts.