Synthesizing Information From Language Samples and Standardized Tests in School-Age Bilingual Assessment

Abstract

Purpose: Although language samples and standardized tests are regularly used in assessment, few studies provide clinical guidance on how to synthesize information from these testing tools. This study extends previous work on the relations between tests and language samples to a new population-school-age bilingual speakers with primary language impairment-and considers the clinical implications for bilingual assessment. Method: Fifty-one bilingual children with primary language impairment completed narrative language samples and standardized language tests in English and Spanish. Children were separated into younger (ages 5;6 [years; months]-8;11) and older (ages 9;0-11;2) groups. Analysis included correlations with age and partial correlations between language sample measures and test scores in each language. Results: Within the younger group, positive correlations with large effect sizes indicated convergence between test scores and microstructural language sample measures in both Spanish and English. There were minimal correlations in the older group for either language. Age related to English but not Spanish measures. Conclusions: Tests and language samples complement each other in assessment. Wordless picture-book narratives may be more appropriate for ages 5-8 than for older children. We discuss clinical implications, including a case example of a bilingual child with primary language impairment, to illustrate how to synthesize information from these tools in assessment.C linical language assessment of school-age children serves multiple purposes. The main goals are to identify a disorder, describe a child's language system, plan for treatment, and monitor ongoing progress (Kohnert, 2013). To accomplish these varied goals, a comprehensive assessment includes direct measures of a child's language as well as indirect measures that have been gathered from reviewing existing educational and medical information, interviewing parents and teachers, and systematically observing within structured and unstructured settings. Cheng (1997) termed this comprehensive assessment framework the RIOT process: review, interview, observation, and testing. For bilingual children, it is essential to include both first and second languages (L1 and L2) in this assessment framework.The present article focuses on the testing portion of the RIOT process, which can serve multiple purposes within a comprehensive language assessment. Two types of testing tools-standardized tests and language samples-are considered for a group of bilingual children with primary language impairment (PLI). We examine the extent to which these two types of assessment tools are related within each language and discuss how our results can contribute to a broader understanding of bilingual PLI. We present a case example to illustrate how the two sources of information can be integrated to address two specific assessment purposes: describing the overall language system and planning for treatment. Before presenting the data, we frame the study by reviewing the us...

Relationships Among Conversational Language Samples and Norm-Referenced Test Scores

“…Associations between norm-referenced tests and conversational measures will be strongest on expressive measures of syntax, followed by measures of paragraph comprehension, then measures of pragmatic language. Previous researchers have demonstrated that MLUS correlates with some measures of standardized testing when using a narrative task [22,23]. Therefore, we expect the relationship between MLUS and a measure of syntactic construction to be stronger than the relationship between MLUS and comprehension or pragmatics.…”

“…We expect TNW to be more strongly related to measure of syntactic construction than comprehension or pragmatics. Because previous researchers have indicated that the relationship between TNW from narrative language samples and norm-referenced language measures is only significant for older children [22,23], it is possible that, because the children in this study are younger, there will not be a significant relationship between the two. Hypothesis 3.…”

“…Despite this, SLPs report not using LSA because it has limited recognition as a valid assessment measure [7]. In Finally, Ebert and Pham [23] analyzed the relationships among five language measures taken from narrative language samples and the scores from three different norm-referenced tests. The 51 bilingual children who participated in the study had been diagnosed with language impairment.…”

“…The associations between norm-referenced tests and measures obtained from narrative language samples have ranged substantially [22]. Emerging evidence suggests that these relationships are stronger in younger children, but are less robust with older children [22,23]. Notably absent from the literature is research examining the relationships between conversational language sample measures and norm-referenced tests.…”

Should We Use Sentence- or Text-Level Tasks to Measure Oral Language Proficiency in Year-One Students following Whole-Class Intervention?

“…Informal measures reduce the bias of standardised norm-referenced assessments that over-identify students from culturally diverse or low socioeconomic backgrounds [40, 41]. For example, there is a growing body of evidence supporting the use of oral narrative tasks to appraise student language abilities in both monolingual and bilingual students [42, 43]. The findings from these studies indicate student performance on oral narrative tasks was similar for both groups of students, suggesting bilingual students were not disadvantaged by this measure [42, 43].…”