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JCPSLP
Volume 15, Number 2 2013
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
know the language of the client or have strong knowledge
of the child’s culture. Our goal is to present a framework for
using LSA within the comprehensive assessment of CALD
children in Australia, which is summarised in Box 1.
Using interview data to plan for
collecting language samples
The first step in the comprehensive evaluation of CALD
children is to consult with those familiar with the child and
his/her culture, including family members, teachers, and
cultural informants. By using interviews, SLPs have the
opportunity to summarise concerns about the child,
developmental milestones, and family history (Kohnert,
2010; Restrepo, 1998). Restrepo (1998) demonstrated the
critical role of parent report in identifying the presence or
absence of a true impairment by testing a group of
predominantly Spanish-speaking CALD children using a
battery of norm-referenced tests, language sample
measures, and parent report. By comparing the sensitivity
and specificity of various combinations of tests, Restrepo
identified that parent report coupled with a language
sample measure was most effective in identifying children
with true language impairment.
The SLP can also use information from the interview to
estimate the child’s relative proficiency in L1 and L2, which
will assist in planning the types of direct assessments
to administer (Kohnert, 2010). Knowing a child’s relative
proficiency across L1 and L2 assists the SLP in interpreting
the assessment data. If a child has limited proficiency in
a language, we would still expect age-level performance
in the dominant language if there is no impairment. If, on
the other hand, low performance is observed in both the
dominant and non-dominant language, the child would
have a true impairment. Gutiérrez-Clellen and Kreiter (2003)
developed a questionnaire that document children’s first
and second language proficiency and is highly correlated
with direct measures of language proficiency.
The SLP can further use the interview to identify the
child’s familiarity with the planned testing procedures.
More accurate performance is observed in CALD children
when they complete assessments in familiar formats. For
example, Fagundes, Haynes, Haak, and Moran (1998)
compared the performance of mainstream children
(Caucasian) and CALD children (African-American) from
the United States who completed a norm-referenced
language test in two formats: standard procedures with
line drawings (familiar to Caucasian but unfamiliar to
African-American) and adapted procedures embedded into
thematic activities (familiar to both Caucasian and African-
American). Fagundes et al. (1998) found that there were
significant differences between the groups for the standard
procedures but no significant differences for the modified
thematic procedures, suggesting that the African-American
children’s performance was more accurately captured with
the familiar task. A variety of methods for eliciting language
samples have been described in the literature, including
play-based samples, conversations, interviews, narratives,
and expository samples (see Westerveld, 2011). During
the interview, the SLP can identify the most appropriate
conversational partners for the child or determine the child’s
experience retelling stories.
Collecting and analysing language
samples in English
For all clients with at least a basic level of proficiency in
English, we recommend analysing English samples for use
monolingual English-speaking peers on norm-referenced
vocabulary tests, possibly due to limited experience with
the testing format and/or limited exposure to the vocabulary
items. Therefore, SLPs working with CALD clients are
instead recommended to use comprehensive assessments
incorporating a variety of data sources to describe the
children’s language functioning, including interviews,
structured observation, criterion-referenced assessments,
language samples, and dynamic assessment (SPA, 2009;
White & Jin, 2011).
Language sample analysis:
A powerful tool within the
comprehensive assessment
Decades of research have revealed the value of language
sample analysis (LSA) in describing children’s language
abilities and there is a general consensus that LSA should
be part of SLPs’ regular assessment protocol (e.g.,
Westerveld, 2011). When completing LSA, the SLP takes a
sample of the child’s language use in a functional context,
such as telling a story or conversing with a parent.
Language samples are typically recorded, transcribed, and
analysed using measures that are intended to generalise to
other contexts and serve as a general indicator of a child’s
expressive language ability (Miller, Andriacchi, Nockerts,
Westerveld, & Gillon, 2012). In addition, multiple measures
of language proficiency can be derived from a single
sample, providing a rich description of a child’s relative
strengths and weaknesses. For example, Westerveld and
Gillon (2010) documented three distinct linguistic domains
that can be acquired from a single oral narrative language
sample (content, grammatical ability, and grammatical
complexity) and used to develop profiles of children’s
narrative ability. Most research on LSA has been completed
with monolingual English-speaking children. Results from
this research indicate LSA is effective in distinguishing
children with language impairment from their typically
developing peers (e.g., Heilmann, Miller, & Nockerts, 2010).
Naturalistic and descriptive criterion-referenced
assessments, such as LSA, tend to be more appropriate
and less biased for CALD populations than their norm-
referenced counterparts (White & Jin, 2011). By using
LSA, clinicians can minimise some of the format biases
observed in norm-referenced language assessments. While
most norm-referenced tests require children to perform
decontextualised language tasks on demand, language
sampling procedures simply require children to engage in
naturalistic discourse. Typical language sample contexts,
such as conversations and narratives, are present in some
form across cultures and should be familiar to most clients
(e.g., Bliss & McCabe, 2008).
There are many examples of successfully using LSA
procedures to assess the oral language skills of CALD
populations (e.g., Miller, Heilmann, Nockerts, Iglesias,
Fabiano, & Francis, 2006; Ooi & Wong, 2012; Thordardottir,
Rothenberg, Rivard, & Naves, 2006). However, most of
these studies were completed where the language was
spoken by the majority of the population, such as Chinese
in Malaysia (Ooi & Wong, 2012), or by a large percentage
of the population, such as Spanish in the United States
(Miller et al., 2006) and French in Canada (Thordardottir et
al., 2006). While these studies provide general support for
the use of LSA with CALD children, the results do not fully
generalise to the Asia-Pacific region and its wide range of
languages and cultures, where clinicians are less likely to