DA is becoming more and more known as an alternative method for a more objective screening of CLD children. It is also steadily included in recommendations of assessments for this population in the field of Speech and Language Therapy. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, to this day there is no formal protocole of Dynamic Assessment of Language in German, and especially within the Swiss context.
Our study, is, therefore, one of the first -if not the first- attempts to provide such an instrument. As such, the present research provided some promising results but also had its limitations.
Overall, our results have shown that employing DA differentiated more clearly CLD children with German as an additional language from their peers with a suspicion of LI, both in the areas of
Vocabulary, as well as Phonology, compared to the static measures that were used. This differentiation was more pronounced regarding children’s ability to employ clues following a mediation phase in order to establish the meaning of a new word that was previously hard to retain, as well as their ability to recall this new word immediately after the teaching phase and express it after some time had passed.
In the domain of phonology, although the static instrument that was used, also provided some good differentiation of the skills of the two groups, the children’s ability to successfully repeat a word following a dynamic interaction was an, overall, more accurate differentiating index than the static measure. Furthermore, the ability to successfully repeat sounds, the number of successfully elicited sounds following a prompt (Stimulability), as well as the Inconsistency rate between the productions of the same word on two different occasions constituted further accurate differentiating factors of the skills of both groups. These results corroborate existing findings in this domain both in English (Dodd, 2013) and in German (Fox-Boyer & Strutzke, 2018).
Also, apart from their differentiating power, the adapted Dynamic Vocabulary and Phonology instruments were also significantly associated with a series of external measures. The Dynamic Vocabulary instrument was moderately associated with the Static test PDSS (Comprehension of Nouns), which is an established measure of lexical ability (albeit not standardised with CLD children), thus confirming, to a certain extent, the usefulness of our DA as a measure of lexical learning potential (See Law & Camilleri, 2007). Furthermore, the fact that the DA of Vocabulary was associated with several subtests of the Lise-DaZ test, which has been already validated with bilingual children, further confirms the usefulness of our DA for this population. Nevertheless, in several cases the Lise-DaZ tasks were quite hard for the children of this study, and only few Caseload children were able to respond to some of the tasks (thus minimising the possibility of a significant correlation). Even so,
126 there were some substantial qualitative differences between the two groups as shown, for example by children’s ability to form sentences. These differences in performance are in line with the types of difficulties LI children are frequently reported to encounter in German (Schulz & Tracy, 2011). Lastly, several of our DA measures were, also, moderately associated with the already validated NWR
repetition tasks (Mottier test), establishing that these measures evaluate similar constructs, at least to a certain extent. This was less obvious with the parental questionnaire at least as shown by the between-group correlations.
From a clinical point of view, and taking into analysis the qualitative results, this DA may be considered as an initial, accurate evaluation of children’s ability to benefit from contextual cues to quickly build new referents and recall them. It may also provide a gross screen as to whether a CLD child might present with a simple phonological delay or whether there are indications of more serious phonological disorders or possible dyspraxia. In that case, a more detailed assessment might need to be administered and the child should be prioritised for therapy. In its present format this DA might be employed mostly qualitatively as an informal, additional source of information of children’s ability to benefit from teaching both at the level of learning new vocabulary as well as at a phonological/
articulation level.
Nonetheless, this project being an initial, small-scale adaptation of the DAPPLE study, it is also characterised by a series of limitations affecting the type of possible analysis that could be performed with our data.
First, a larger caseload sample of at least 25 children would allow for a series of more elaborate types of analysis, such as discriminant analysis or the ROC analysis, which would have been the method of choice for a screening test that could provide clear cut-off scores.
Furthermore, given the floor effects that were noted with several of the Lise-DaZ subtests but, also, the general difficulty to identify children with a clearer diagnosis, it appears that a future study should focus on the age group between 4.5 to 5.5. This would help overcome the important issue that affected many areas in this study, namely that the official age to start school is 4 instead of 3 (as is in the UK).
This would, of course, necessitate a standardised test of receptive vocabulary for this age group. In addition, in order to complete the DAPPLE battery in German in the future it would be important to include the syntax part that was not possible to incorporate in this study, namely the subtest of expressive language. This would provide some additional, necessary information regarding children´s morphosyntactic development, which has been identified as an important area of need in LI children with German as an additional language.
Another limitation of this small-scale project was that due to a lack of resources it was not possible to personally access all the families involved in this study and/or hire interpreters. This would improve the number of parents that could have answered the AldeQ questionnaire and increase the amount of
127 detailed information regarding the duration and pattern of exposure to German, and the overall
socioeconomic background information that could have been obtained for each participant.
Overall, we should acknowledge that measuring the linguistic skills of very young CLD children has been complicated during this project due to extrinsic reasons, such as the relatively short exposure to the L2 language and the kindergarten setting, as well as intrinsic factors, such as distractibility and potential shyness. In that sense, the evaluation procedure of this project very much confirms Kohnert’s (2010) comment about the considerable variability caused both by ‘bilingual” and “monolingual”
factors during CLD assessment. Furthermore, our small sample size limited the power of our results.
In conclusion, the promising indications of the present project should be further researched in the future through a larger project. This would permit more powerful statistical analyses. Also, such a study should focus on replicating the described process to examine how stable the present findings are.
The need for a larger scale project with more resources would provide an important diagnostic screen to assess quickly and efficiently CLD children with German as an L2 in suspicion of LI, regardless of their initial L1 and their exact time of exposure to German. Such an instrument could prove to be a valid way to complement existing diagnostic procedures in this domain.
128
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