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.

英法语篇研究——加拿大（FrEnDS-CAN）是一项由多所加拿大高校科研联盟牵头的多中心研究项目。本项目针对7至12岁单语与双语儿童的语篇技能（discourse skills）发展展开探究。研究采集了法语单语、英语单语以及英法双语儿童的语篇样本（discourse samples），此外还纳入了以阿拉伯语为家庭语言的儿童样本。本次研究涵盖三类语篇情境（discourse contexts）：会话情境、叙事（故事讲述）情境以及说明性（对喜爱的游戏或运动进行描述）情境。本研究设有两大核心目标：其一，通过分析语言状态（单语/双语）与语篇类型对词汇、句子及语篇结构层面语言发展各维度的影响，深化我们对单语与双语儿童语言发展规律的认知；其二，通过构建常模信息与三类语篇情境下的语言样本数据库，提升我们识别单语与双语儿童语言障碍的能力。