Evaluating Bilingual Children’s Native Language Abilities in Côte d’Ivoire: Introducing the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit for Attié, Abidji, and Baoulé

Abstract

Few standardized language assessments are adapted to different cultural and linguistic contexts to assess children’s first language (L1) abilities. We introduce the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit for measuring phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness in the Abidji, Attié, and Baoulé languages of Côte d’Ivoire. Six hundred and three primary-school children (age 4–14) completed language assessments in their L1 and French. The toolkit provided a reliable and comprehensive assessment of children’s language abilities. We observed age- and grade-related increases in all subtest scores. Still, children scored higher in their L1 compared to French, highlighting the need for language assessments in a bilingual’s two languages to achieve an accurate measure of children’s language abilities. The ability to benchmark children’s scores relative to age- and grade-norms are discussed in the context of language of instruction education policies as well as the potential use of age- and grade-norms in identifying children with language impairment and/or children who are at risk for reading difficulties due to poor language skills.

Home learning environment and physical development impact children’s executive function development and literacy in rural Côte d’Ivoire

“…Overall, 73% of CE1 (Grade 3) students master less than half of the target language, literacy, and mathematics skills for their grade level (UNESCO, 2016). This academic achievement gap is the widest for children in rural areas (UNESCO, 2016), where a high percentage of children cannot read (Ball et al, 2022;Jasińska et al, 2022;Sobers et al, under review). Importantly, rural areas are among the poorest regions in Côte d'Ivoire, and children in these regions may be particularly vulnerable to the negative impact of low-resource environments on educational outcomes.…”

“…Children's literacy skills were measured using timed letter, word, and nonword reading subtests in the French language version of the EGRA (Ball et al, 2022;Jasińska et al, 2022), previously used in Senegal (Gove & Wetterberg, 2011;RTI International, 2015). Before beginning each subtest, children were given a practice trial where the experimenter provided feedback and scaffolding.…”

“…Experimenters marked incorrect items and terminated the task if the child failed to read the first ten items correctly or after 60 seconds had elapsed. These tasks have previously been used in Côte d'Ivoire (Ball et al, 2022;Jasińska et al, 2022;Sobers et al, under review) Letter reading. Children were asked to read 100 letters or combinations of letters (grapheme clusters, e.g., "ch") Word reading.…”

Does non-linguistic segmentation still predict literacy in an L2 education? Statistical learning in Ivorian primary schools

“…This developmental pathway from oral language to emergent literacy to literacy is more complicated in a second language (L2), where oral language competency, phonological processing ability, and print knowledge arise at different times and vary widely between populations (August & Shanahan, 2006;Chan & Sylva, 2015), and the relative importance of these oral and print skills in both first (L1) and second language (L2) for L2 literacy change with age (Jasińska et al, 2019). Particularly in low-income, agricultural communities like rural Côte d'Ivoire, many emergent readers are still acquiring basic oral and print L2 French in middle-and late-childhood, from a diverse set of L1s and L1 phonological abilities (Akpé et al, 2021;Jasińska et al, 2022). Therefore generalizations about the skills that underlie childhood literacy could be greatly improved by experimental paradigms that can be applied across children from many L1s and L2s, with varying exposure to print and varying ages of acquisition, i.e., non-linguistic tasks which offer insights on individual differences in linguistic outcomes (such as literacy).…”

Effective bilingual education in Francophone West Africa: Constraints and possibilities

“…Notably, these results emphasize the importance of evaluating children's learning in all of their languages. Indeed, evaluating children's language skills in both languages is a more comprehensive indicator of children's true language abilities in multilingual West African contexts (Jasińska et al, 2022).…”