In a speech pathology context, there are many reasons why understanding a child’s skills in the language(s) spoken at home may be important, even if this is not the language of education. These include:

  • being able to provide an accurate response to the child, family, education, and/or health professional’s concerns and reason for referral (e.g., is the child experiencing some kind of difficulty in learning language, consistent with a speech or language disorder?);
  • being able to recommend or provide supports that are most likely to be helpful to the child and family, and address their priorities.

In a city where more than 100 different languages are used by families in the home, this means that understanding language development across a diverse range of languages is essential for any speech pathologist working with children’s speech and language.

The aim of speech-language assessment

The aim of a speech-language assessment is to determine whether a child is having difficulty learning to use and/or understand language. It aims to determine whether there is a

  • cognitive,
  • socio-cognitive,
  • sensory, or
  • physical

reason that a child is having difficulty, which may be described as a type of speech sound disorder, language disorder, or difficulty.

Depending on the setting, the assessment may also aim to identify what types of supports may be able to support the child’s development and/or wellbeing.

This can be summarised in the process:

The assessment process involves gathering the most useful and reliable evidence to best answer these assessment questions.

English-language assessment

Standardised English-language tools (such as the CELF-5), or other standardised tools in the language of education, are often used as one piece of evidence in this assessment process.

These are usually designed to provide specific types of information:

  • they are designed to provide a ranking, of how much English the child knows (or the language of the tool), compared to other children the same age;
  • the tasks and items in the tool are selected to be as reliable as possible in producing that ranking.

Depending on the tool, the tasks and items included may also aim to:

  • provide an overall score that correlates well with other activities, such as academic reading comprehension tasks in the language of testing;
  • rank children most accurately within a particular range, such as producing the most reliable rankings within the average range of scores.

This can provide a useful piece of evidence in the assessment process, but doesn’t answer all of the assessment questions.

Consider these assessment questions, and the evidence provided by standardised tool in the language of instruction:

(1) Is the child experiencing difficulty learning to use and/or understand language?

A low score means that the child knows less of the language tested, compared to other children the same age.

If the language of testing is the only language the child is exposed to, then this suggests some kind of difficulty: the child has learnt less than other children, given the (presumed) same amount of experience with the language.

(2a) What is the extent of this difficulty? How is it affecting the child’s life?

Depending on the statistical properties of the tool, a lower score may indicate less knowledge of the language. The relationship between scores depends on the properties of the tool.

Clinicians may interpret the child’s ranking to make inferences about how the child may fare, compared to other children the same age, in contexts that involve the use of the language tested. However, this is not directly observed.

(2b) What is the nature of this difficulty? What may be causing or contributing to it?

Standardised tools do not provide information about why a child achieves a particular score, or what factors may have contributed to the child’s knowledge of the language tested. Some tools have statistical properties that allow a child’s relative ranking of different aspects of language knowledge (e.g. ability to repeat sentences vs single word receptive vocabulary), can provide some evidence to support inferences in this area.

If the child is exposed to other languages, then a low score does not indicate whether the child has a difficulty learning language overall, or whether the child has not yet had the experience with the language of testing to develop skills to the same level as other children.

(3) Is there anything that may support the child’s development and/or wellbeing?

The types of supports that may be helpful for a child depend on the nature and extent of a child’s difficulty, and how this is affecting the child’s life.

Children exposed to more than one language

A child’s score on a standardised tool represents how much a child knows of the language tested, compared to other children the same age. Any child may attain a low score because:

  1. the child has some kind of cognitive, socio-cognitive, sensory, or physical difficulty that is causing difficulty in learning language;
  2. the child has not had enough experience with the language tested to have learned as much as other children the same age (e.g., having experience with one or more other languages);
  3. the child has made good progress in learning the language they have been exposed to, but this language has different characteristics from what was tested.

For example, a child who primarily uses one or more languages other than English at home may attain a low score on an English CELF-5 because:

While the first scenario (a child having a speech or language disorder) and the second scenario (a multilingual child learning English) may be more familiar, the third scenario also occurs.

A multilingual child may attain a low score on a standardised tool in English (or the language of instruction) for a number of reasons. But if a cognitive, socio-cognitive, sensory, or physical difficulty is present that is likely to cause difficulty in learning language, this difficulty should be evident in the first language(s) the child has been learning.