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Bilingual SLP
Step 2: Informal Assessment Measures
Despite the common, and sometimes required, use of standardized assessments to complete our bilingual evaluations, the literature suggests that informal assessment tasks are more valid to gather more reliable information on the communication skills of bilingual children. This is supported by the fact that all of our bilingual students have unique backgrounds, exposures, experiences, and skills. Using informal assessment measures will support your data collection and consider these children unique language experiences.
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Some of the most common informal assessment tasks are:
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language samples
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word and non-word repetition tasks
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sentence repetition tasks
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dynamic assessment
To read more about informal assessment measures you can click here !
Let's explore some of the informal assessments together!
Language Samples:
Language samples are crucial for analyzing bilingual children language skills in both languages. Language samples allow you to analyze and compare a child’s language performance, in both languages, in the areas of syntax, morphosyntax, vocabulary use, utterance length. Most importantly, language samples would help you identify language transfers, use of L1 and L2, and their language proficiency. Because of the number of skills that can be observed in a language sample, this tool is helpful to differentiate bilingualism-influenced errors from atypical errors and to identify whether the child presents a language difference or a language disorder.
Non-word repetition tasks:
When assessing bilingual children, non-word repetition tasks can be used to compare phonological awareness in both child’s languages. These tasks are recommended to use with bilingual children because they are less culturally and linguistically biased. Since children are presented with stimuli they have never heard before, their performance is not associated with their prior linguistic knowledge but their abilities to perceive, briefly retain, and repeat these novel stimuli. For this reason, this task can be more useful to differentiate a language difference from a language disorder than other common assessment methods. Non-word repetition tasks can also give you information about the child's working memory, speech perception, phonological assembly, and short-term memory.
Dynamic Assessment:
Dynamic Assessment has supporting research evidence for its use for identifying and planning treatment for children from culturally and linguistically different backgrounds (Petersen, et al. 2017). This assessment strategy is great for bilingual children since it enables clinicians to assess areas of concerns in both languages by measuring their language learning potential. After identifying the areas of concern, clinicians attempt to teach the skill to the child and measure the amount of support needed to learn it. With this information we can determine if there’s a language disorder or difference due to second-language influence using a less biased approach. Some of the tasks that can be included in the Dynamic Assessment are vocabulary learning, narratives, answering questions, fast mapping, non-word repetition, and others.
