Author: Wei Qin Teoh
Teoh, Wei Qin, 2019 Assessing the oral language skills of bilingual preschool children with variable language experience: The exploration of a dynamic assessment approach, Flinders University, College of Nursing and Health Sciences
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Bilingual children living in multilingual countries are often exposed to a variety of languages in their home, school and community. Their language ability in each of the languages they speak is dependent on the amount of exposure and opportunities they have in each language. Therefore, bilingual children, even from the same bilingual community, often present with variable language experience. Consequently, the assessment of young bilingual children’s oral language to screen for or diagnose language impairment becomes challenging.
Speech and language pathologists have to clinically determine whether a bilingual child with reported language concerns has a true language impairment, which requires intervention, or is a child who presents with perceived difficulties resulting from the lack of relevant language experience (i.e. language difference). Non-biased evaluations of bilingual children’s language abilities are necessary to aid SLPs to differentiate between bilingual children with true LI and bilingual children with typical language development. Standardised assessments that are known as “tools of our profession” (Stow & Dodd, 2003. p. 363) may not provide an accurate assessment of bilingual children’s language abilities as they are mostly designed and normed for monolingual children. Instead, a range of alternative assessment approaches such as
dynamic assessment are recommended to be used for a less biased evaluation of bilingual children’s language abilities. However, most of the recommendations stemmed from research that were conducted with bilingual children who formed the minority in predominantly monolingual English-speaking countries. It is unknown if speech and language pathologists working in predominantly bilingual countries are adopting recommended alternative assessment approaches when assessing bilingual children in their communities.
The aim of this thesis was to address the gap in the research on the use of alternative assessment
approaches in evaluating the language skills of bilingual children from predominantly bilingual 14 countries. To do so, two phases of research were conducted in Singapore, an English-speaking but predominantly bilingual country in South-East-Asia. In Phase One of the research, a survey questionnaire was conducted to understand the current assessment approaches that are used by speech and language pathologists to assess the language skills of young Singaporean bilingual children; and the assessment challenges they faced. A total of 26 speech and language therapists working with the paediatric population in Singapore participated in the study. One of the key findings from Phase One was that the SLPs in Singapore were selecting commercially-available standardised assessments over recommended alternative assessment approaches when evaluating the language skills of Singaporean bilingual children.
To contribute to research on the use of alternative assessment approaches and as a continuation from Phase One, Phase Two of the study developed and explored the use of dynamic assessment process to assess the language skills of Singaporean bilingual children. Dynamic assessments assess children’s language ability by evaluating their language learning potential in a ‘Test-Teach-Retest’ assessment format. The Validity Argument Framework (Kane, 2006; 2013) was adopted in Phase Two to gather a chain of favourable evidence from the development of the DA task to decisions based on the scores obtained on the DA. The performance on the DA of 48 typically developing English-Mandarin bilingual preschool
children and 18 English-Mandarin bilingual preschool children who were identified to require on-going speech and language therapy were gathered. In addition, the performance of nine English-Mandarin bilingual preschool children with language concerns but were not identified to require speech and language therapist assessment was also gathered. These children were instead referred for learning support services with learning support educators. Evidence gathered found that in comparison to a standardised assessment and regardless of their language experience (i.e. English dominant or Mandarin dominant), the children’s performance on the dynamic assessment was more accurate in differentiating those who were typically developing and those who likely had language impairment (i.e. recommended to receive on-going speech and language therapy) than the standardised measure.
The findings from Phase One and Phase Two contribute to the understanding of current assessment approaches and challenges faced by speech and language pathologists working in a predominantly bilingual country. Most importantly, the findings provide validity evidence to advocate the use of dynamic assessment as a less biased assessment approach for assessing the language skills of bilingual children with variable language experience.
Keywords: bilingual assessment, dynamic assessment, bilingual, alternative assessment approaches, Validity Argument Framework, Singapore
Subject: Speech Pathology thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2019
School: College of Nursing and Health Sciences
Supervisor: Associate Professor Chris Brebner