Developing assessment tools for bilingual and minority language acquisition

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Date
2008
Authors
O'Toole, Ciara
Fletcher, Paul
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Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists (IASLT); J&R Press Ltd.
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Abstract
Profiling bilingual and minority language acquisition is becoming increasingly important for the work of speech and language therapists in Ireland. The Official Language Act dictates that all government and public services must be provided in Irish as well as English. Therefore SLTs must now be prepared to assess and treat clients in the Irish language. This paper describes how an assessment of early expressive vocabulary and grammatical development for children aged between 16 and 40 months was adapted to Irish from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson, Dale, Reznick , Bates , Thal, Pethnick, Tomasello, Mervis and Stiles, 1994). Ongoing work in piloting and measuring the validity and reliability of the parent-report instrument is also outlined. This study has implications for developing assessment tools for working with Irish-speaking and bilingual children.
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Keywords
Bilingual language assessment , Irish language development , MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories
Citation
O'Toole, C. and Fletcher, P. (2008) 'Developing assessment tools for bilingual and minority language acquisition'. Journal of Clinical Speech and Language Studies, 16, pp. 12-27.
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© 2008