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Developing an expressive language assessment for children in Rochdale with a Pakistani heritage background

Rochdale Primary Care Trust, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; Rochdale Sure Start Project, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Carolyn Letts

School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

This paper reports work in progress to develop an assessment procedure for expressive language, to be used with children living in the Rochdale area of the UK and speaking Mirpuri, Punjabi and/or Urdu. The assessment materials and procedure are described, together with the principles for scoring. Normative data is currently being collected. Children tested so far have demonstrated the need to allow for code-switching and lexical borrowing and that attention to ‘literal’ translation of the target language is required. Discrepancies between reported and actual languages used are also noted. Expressive language appears unexpectedly sparse in some cases. Possible reasons for this are discussed. This research has highlighted many difficulties in attempting to construct an assessment of this kind.

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