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1. Tests for signed language acquisition 2. Tests for educational purposes 3. Tests for linguistic research 4. Test for adult second language learners
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Signed Language Assessment
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from : Tobias Haug: “Review of Sign Language Assessment Instruments”, an earlier version of that paper 2005. (revised in cooperation with Ros Herman, August 2003) Assessment of British Sign Language Development The goal of this project was to design, produce, and standardize an assessment of British Sign Language (BSL) Development for the use with deaf children (Herman et al. 1999). This assessment is of special interest to professionals working with deaf children to make a baseline assessment, to identify language difficulties, and to evaluate the outcomes of therapy programs (Herman et al. 1998; Herman 1998). The BSL assessment is an instrument that provides a deeper investigation of the BSL receptive skills of deaf students. The assessment is aimed at children aged 3 to 11 years old. It has been standardised on 135 children. This assessment focuses on selected aspects of morphology and syntax of BSL. The assessment consists of the following: (1) vocabulary check, (2) video-based receptive skills test. Data collected on a narrative task are currently being analysed for separate publication (R. Herman, personal communication, June 9, 2003) . (1) Vocabulary check: The vocabulary is designed to ensure that the children understand the vocabulary used in the receptive skills test (test 2). The children confirm their knowledge of the vocabulary (24 items) through a simple picture-naming task which identifies signs which vary from those used in the test. The children are required to name pictures so that the assessor can check whether their version of the sign correspond to the one used in the test. After the vocabulary check, the tester can decide if he/she can administer either the northern or the southern variation of the test (R. Herman, personal communication, November 24, 2000). (2) Video-based receptive-skills test: consists only of 40 items, organized in order of difficulty. Ther are two versions of this task; one for the north and one for the south of the UK, covering the regional variation in signs. The items of this task assess children’s receptive knowledge of a variety of BSL structures of syntax and morphology: (1) negation, (2) number and distribution, (3) verb morphology, and (4) noun-verb distinction. The test procedure is explained by a deaf adult on the test video. The video has fade-outs between the items to allow the children time to respond. The children respond by selecting the most appropriate picture from a choice of three or four in a color picture booklet. The test takes about twelve minutes when not paused. Younger children sometimes needed to stop and see items again, which extend the testing time to about 20 minutes. The scoring is on a pass-or-fail level. Materials: the pictures are easily recognizable and appealing to the age range of the subjects. Additionally, a range of distracter items are used to reduce guessing, and the location of the target picture on the page is randomized. The test is presented to the child on video, including test instructions, practice items, and individual test stimuli to guarantee a standardized presentation of the test and reducing the demands on the tester. However, the vocabulary check is administered live and requires some BSL skills on the part of the tester. The goal was to develop a norm-referenced test based on empirical data. Although a BSL test is more necessary for deaf children of hearing families, there are problems in standardizing assessments on this group because of the variability of language performance. So for standardization of the assessment, a more homogeneous group should be used. For this BSL assessment, deaf children of deaf parents (DCDP), hearing children with native signing background, and selected deaf children from hearing families (DCHP) were included (n=135). Test Development: Prior to the standardization of the BSL assessment, a pilot study was conducted. The criteria included for the subjects of the pilot was age and native signing background. All 41 children from the pilot were between 3;00 and 11;06 years old. This included 28 deaf children where only one parent was deaf, but BSL was used at home by all family members as well as 13 hearing children with a native signing background. The children were assessed on the vocabulary checklist, the receptive task, and other BSL assessments in development. A deaf researcher with fluent BSL skills and a hearing researcher with good BSL skills administered the test. The results of the deaf and hearing subjects indicated that they did not perform significantly differently on the receptive task. Therefore, both groups could be included in the standardization phase. A preliminary analysis looked at the age effect by banding subjects into three broad age groups. Children who failed the test were excluded from the analysis. This left 25 subjects divided into three groups: (1) eldest, age 9;06-11;06, n=8, (2) middle, age 6;00-9;05, n=10, and (3) youngest, age 3;00-5;11, n=7. A One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed a highly significant relationship between age and raw score. The relationship was significantly different for age groups (1) and (3), (2) and (3), but not between (1) and (2). This was anticipated, since most grammatical development is completed by age eight. A statistical analysis of overall trends in the size of raw scores in relation to age revealed that the size of raw scores increases with age. To investigate the difficulty of the items in the receptive task, the item facility analysis was used. Items that were either passed by all children (too easy) or failed by all children (too difficult) were excluded for the revised version. The items were ordered from easy to difficult The discrimination value was examined by looking at the subjects’ total test scores in comparison to their score for individual items. Items that failed to achieve a significant correlation of between 0.2 and 0.8 were discarded. That left 40 items of the original 68 of the pilot. Inter-rater reliability was established by double-marking the performance of eleven children on all 68 items of the receptive task. The differences in the total raw score obtained by a different scorer was extremely low. Test reliability was investigated by retesting 10% of the subjects one month later. Test-retest reliability was found to be high. Based on the experience made from the pilot study, changes to the test and to administration were introduced. For the receptive test, the practice items were presented live by the tester, especially for the younger children who seemed to respond better by live test instruction. The video also now included practice items where feedback could be provided from the tester prior to the test start. The revised version had fewer items so that the test could be completed in one sitting. A few vocabulary terms were changed in light of children’s responses on the vocabulary pre-test. The children from the pilot were included in the standardization study (their scores were analyzed separately). Additionally, selected deaf children from hearing families were included. There were 135 children included in the standardization procedure located in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The age range was from 3;00 to 13;00. Children previously diagnosed as having additional handicaps were excluded from the sample. Additionally, children completed two subtests of the Snijders-Oomen test of Non-Verbal Abilities to assess the general performance of the children as a basis for inclusion in the projectHearing children were assessed using a subtest from the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) to measure their language development in English for subsequent comparison with their language level in BSL. All tests were administered by a deaf researcher and a hearing researcher with good BSL skills. Six age groups were selected for the standardization of the receptive task. The age groups were: (1) age 3;00-3;11, n=10, (2) age 4;00-4;11, n=15, (3) age 5;00-5;11, n=18, (4) age 6;00-7;11, n=33, (5) age 8;00-9;11, n=32, and (6) age 10;00+, n=27. It was considered important to maintain yearly intervals for the younger groups (age 3;00-5;11) since progress in language development is particular marked in this age range. For the older children (6;00-13;00) two yearly intervals were chosen.
The scores of the receptive task were compared for children according to their exposure to BSL.. Only in the youngest age groups did the children from deaf families perform better. Later on, deaf children from hearing families who were in bilingual programs performed slightly better, however the difference was not statistically significant. There was no significant difference between children from deaf families and children from hearing families with older deaf siblings. In order to establish test-retest reliability for the receptive task, 10% of the children were retested. The test scores were better on the second testing, but the rank order of scores was preserved. There was also a high correlation (.87) between the test and retest scores. Split-half reliability analysis for the internal consistency of the receptive test revealed a high correlation (.90) and, therefore, represents a high internal consistency. The scores for the receptive task of the children involved in the pilot were compared with those not yet exposed to the test materials. There was a slight advantage in the pilot children, however the difference between the groups did not achieve statistical significance (p=0.7). Data has now been collected from an unselected sample of deaf children who use BSL, but have not been exposed to BSL under ideal circumstances, for comparison with the standardisation sample (Herman, in preparation). The BSL receptive skills test is commercially available (Herman et al. 1999). Since the test is available for the public, it can be assumed that the assessors do not need to be extensively trained. For the receptive skills test that operates on a pass or fail level, scoring will not be very time consuming. It takes about 5-10 minutes to administer the vocabulary check. The time of the test depends on the age of the child and the number of items they do not know. The receptive skills task takes 20-30 minutes to administer. It may be necessary to pause the video to allow longer response time for younger children. Older children usually will watch it straight through (R. Herman, personal communication, December 14, 2000). The BSL receptive skills task was adapted to LSF (French Sign Language; C. Courtin, personal communication, May 2, 2002) and Australian Sign Language. An adaptation of this test to DGS (German Sign Language) is under preparation. Among the strengths of the BSL assessment are that the tested items: (1) are based on empirical data, (2) have robust psychometric properties, (3) have standardized procedure and methods for conducting an assessment, (4) have a broad age range, 3-13 years old, (5) can be purchased (receptive skills test), and (6) can be used in a school of the deaf. A weakness of the assessment is: (1) it assesses only certain linguistic structures on morphological and syntactic levels of BSL, not communicative competence. A narrative skills test for BSL based on the same standardisation sample has been published recently. References: Herman, R., Holmes, S. & B. Woll (1998). Design and Standardization of an Assessment of British Sign Language Development for Use with Deaf Children: Final Report, 1998. Manuscript, Department of Language & Communication Science, City University London, UK. Herman, R. (1998). “Issues in Designing an Assessment of British Sign Language Development”. In Proceedings of the Conference of the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists, pp. 332-337. Liverpool, UK. Herman, R., Holmes, S. & B. Woll (1999). Assessing BSL Development - Receptive Skills Test. Coleford, UK: The Forest Bookshop. Herman, R. & Roy, P. (2000). “The influence of child hearing status and type of exposure to BSL on BSL acquisition”. In Proceedings of the 1999 Child Language Seminar, London. Follow this link to a complete bibliography. For more information regarding this test, please contact Ros Herman at City University London or Bencie Woll at University College London. Questions, suggestions, or comments? Please e-mail to mail@signlang-assessment.info This website is maintained by Tobias Haug - Last update: March 2007
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