New research will explore ways to help francophone parents teach their kids to talk

A Sudbury, Ont., researcher hopes her work can help francophone parents in the community teach their children how to talk.

Roxanne Blanger, a faculty member with Laurentian University's School of Speech-Language Pathology, says it's important young children have regular exposure to a language to learn it.

"Children need to be exposed to a lot of words, a lot of different types of words, and frequently in order to develop language at their full potential," she said.

"If that's not happening then it's not to say that they will develop delays, but again, it just places them at increased risk of delays."

Because French is a minority language in Sudbury and most of northern Ontario Blanger says parents often have to work harder to expose their children to the language outside the home.

"Parents have to look very hard and work very hard to find those activities [in French]," she said.

This year Blanger and her co-investigator, Chantal Mayer-Crittenden, received a grant from the Centre national de formation en sant at Laurentian to measure how different reading strategies can help francophone children learn new words.

Blanger says speech delays in young children are a growing source of anxiety for their parents.

But she adds that children learn to talk at their own pace. Even if a child might not be meeting a milestone for speech, they might be communicating in other ways, such as hand gestures or even their facial expressions.

"If I was assessing a child who wasn't using the amount of words that should be observed at one or two years of age, but if they were doing all these other things that are very positive I would be a lot less worried than, say, a child who wasn't doing all those things," she said.

Blanger's two-year research project should also provide resources for educators to help them support language development in young children.