Hadjadj, O., Kehoe, M., & Delage, H. (2024). Dynamic assessment of narrative skills for identifying developmental language disorder in monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children. Language, Speech & Hearing Services in Schools, 55(1), 130–151. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_LSHSS-23-00054
Narratives are useful for assessing language skills in children, covering various domains like vocabulary and grammar. Typically, kids start storytelling with basic plots by age 5 and progress to more complex narratives by age 9. Children with language disorders struggle with both the structure (macrostructure) and details of stories (microstructure). While it is simpler to assess monolingual children for language disorders, bilingual children often are misdiagnosed due to less accurate assessment tools. In bilingual children, exposure time to each language along with age of learning second language are crucial when determining the storytelling abilities, with those exposed to a language later showing weaker language skills, resembling monolingual children with language disorders. Assessing bilingual children in all their languages is crucial to avoid misdiagnosis, but it's often challenging due to language diversity. Various tools, like parental questionnaires and language samples, can help evaluate bilingual children's language skills effectively. Dynamic assessment evaluates children's learning potential rather than static knowledge. It's suggested that children with language disorders have lower learning potential. DA involves teaching phases to improve performance between pre-and post-tests, aiding diagnosis accuracy. Because of its unbiased nature, this study used DA to assess various linguistic skills, including narratives, especially beneficial for diagnosing language disorders in bilingual children.
The main goal of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of Dynamic Assessment in distinguishing DLD and typical language development in French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children. Children (6-11 years old) were given a storytelling task before learning about story elements, then tested again. The test involved 12 questions: 8 focused on story grammar elements (macro-structure) and 4 focused on connectors (microstructure). Results showed no differences in storytelling ability between monolingual and bilingual children on macrostructure or microstructure elements. Children with (DLD) had lower scores than typically developing (TD) children, especially in microstructure elements.
This study provides further evidence that dynamic assessment can be useful in assessing the language abilities of bilingual children. The greater difficulty with story microstructure for children with DLD may indicate the need for tailored teaching methods.
