Background: Children with English as an additional language (EAL) represent 20.6% of children in English primary schools (DfE, 2018). EAL pupils are at risk of underperforming academically unless their English proficiency is on a par with their monolingual peers. Thus, EAL children with low English proficiency require appropriate assessment to distinguish between difficulties due to underlying language impairments (such as developmental language disorder, DLD) or those due to lack of exposure of English. While a lackof English exposure could be overcome in the school context without targeted interventions, those with an undiagnosed impairment require early identification and appropriate support. However, no standardised language assessment for EAL pupils and preschoolers exist in the UK.
Aims: We investigated which methods of language assessment are being used by an array of practitioners who work with EAL children in the UK, including speech and language therapists, teachers and health workers. We additionally asked about practitioners’ attitudes regarding the availability and adequacy of existing means of language assessments for bilinguals.
Methods: A 71-item questionnaire, including open questions, multiple choice questions and Likert scales, was administered between June 2017 and October 2018. Questions concerned the assessment tools practitioners used (primarily for language but also regarding other aspects of behaviour and cognition), their opinions of those tools, satisfaction levels regarding EAL children’s assessment and barriers faced which might hinder satisfactory assessment. In total, 161 practitioners working with children speaking 75 different languages gave comprehensive responses to the questionnaire.
Results: Practitioners do not have confidence in the tools currently available to assess the language needs of bilingual children. As no standard assessments exists in the UK to identify the language needs of EALs, the majority of practitioners rely on informal measures, such as parental reports, observations and information gleaned from other professionals. Assessments standardised on monolingual children are less frequently used, but when they are, the most popular are spoken language assessments such as the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS). Additionally, assessment of bilinguals is often carried out with the aid of interpreters, who are typically untrained in the requirements of speech and language therapy; thus, practitioners are overall dissatisfied with the availability of appropriately trained interpreters. The most common means suggested by respondents to overcoming barriers to assessment of EAL children was greater availability of standardised tests in the appropriate languages.
Conclusions: The predominant use of informal measures and assessments standardised on monolingual children can lead to children with EAL being over-or under-diagnosed with language impairments. Recommendations for training and best practice are discussed.
Manuscript under review - available as a preprint on OSF: https://osf.io/2vjwe/