Development: Language

Introduction

The assessment of language development is aimed at establishing the level of competence or proficiency attained by children and second-language learners in the linguistic knowledge and abilities involved in speaking, listening, reading and writing activities.

From a theoretical point of view, language development assessment rests on similar assumptions and biases as adult language assessment. See Language (General) in this volume. Unlike language adult testing, however, language development assessment presupposes that the linguistic subject's competencies and abilities are not yet fully developed, and thus should be assessed at some intermediate point between an initial non-linguistic state (typical of newborns and people beginning to learn a second language), and the final state typical of people possessing a basic linguistic competence (e.g. normally developed children above 6–7 years old with a good command of their native/mother tongue, and highly proficient second-language learners).1

Individual language tests are used for a number of different practical purposes. According to Stark et al. (1982: 150–151), these include: (1) screening large groups of children in preschool or early school years for language disorders; (2) determining level of language functioning or degree of deficit in language in children considered to be at risk for a language disorder (these measures being often employed in making decisions as to whether a child should be admitted to a treatment programme, assigned to a given level of educational placement, or included in a research study); (3) in-depth evaluation of language and language-related skills in a child who has been admitted to a clinical, educational or research programme; and (4) determining to what extent an intervention programme has benefited individual language-impaired children.

As in adult language assessment, two general perspectives underlie the tools created to assess developing language: a psychometric approach and a cognitive approach.

Classical psychometric assessment – which largely rests on the behaviourist assumptions on language prevailing in the 1950s and 1960s-implicitly views the linguistic progress of children as a relatively linear process that can be adequately outlined through the quantitative scores that subjects obtain in a number of standardized linguistic tasks. Test items (which are not contextually relevant) are selected on the basis of their ability to discriminate between typically developing children at different ages, but not necessarily on developmental considerations. The examiner can derive conclusions about the developmental ‘normality/non-normality’ of a child by merely comparing the language ages and quotients that the child obtains with those expected by age.

The cognitive approach – which is the prevailing one since the early 1970s – views linguistic behaviours as reflecting both the abstract knowledge that a speaker-listener possesses about language (the so-called ‘linguistic competence’), and the ongoing mental processes that operate on linguistic representations in real-time language production and comprehension (‘linguistic performance’). Therefore, language development assessment is primarily focused on the description of the underlying competence of subjects over time, as well as on characteristics and changes in utterances during actual verbal performance.

The cognitive approach implicitly assumes the representational complexity of linguistic competence (which is viewed as consisting of phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic principles), as well as the differential constraints that speaking and comprehension activities impose on the cognitive system.

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