Continuing in my post about a great article about speech and language acquisition in adoptees... (see part 1 here, and see part 2 here.)

Although, as the article tells us, traditional ESL programs are not particularly useful for kids adopted from EE, the parents of EE adopted kids "are very much tuned in to their child's needs."

"They will do anything and everything you ask them to do for their child," she said. "They will research; they're the ones who walk in the door with articles in hand."

Speech-language pathologists should use parents as a resource and involve them in therapy. They are particularly helpful in carry-over.

The fact that the parents succeeded in adopting a child from a foreign country speaks to their "remarkable persistence and resilience,"

The articles says that although in general boys have more speech and language problems than girls, it's not true in the case of children adopted from Eastern Europe: "The girls had more delays in their use of expressive language, while the boys had more problems with reading. Overall, receptive language skills were not as impaired, and they did well with learning basic vocabulary. These findings suggest that the difficulties for most of the children are part of a more general linguistic deficit that seems to follow the pattern of children with specific language impairment (SLI) rather than delayed language or auditory processing deficits."

About 1/3 of children adopted from Eastern European orphanages will show significant delays that require intervention. Interestingly, children adopted at around age 2 might have the most significant problems: older children will have already acquired their native language and can use that to build upon, but at age 2 children typically are switching from single words to syntax, and this is a crucial time for language acquisition.