Table 14 Speech-Language Therapist Sample Demographics ...... It is defined in the field of communicative disorders as a âcode whereby ideas about ...... in school districts is often set at an arbitrary score, such as the 7th percentile or lower ...... overall theme of assessment and diversity. ..... According to the test manual, this.
Speech-Language Therapist Perceptions of Dialect and Risk for Disorder in African American English Speaking Children by Pamela Carol Norton B.A. (San Francisco State University) 1986 M.S. (San Francisco State University) 1993 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with San Francisco State University in Special Education in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Paul R. Ammon, Co-chair Professor Philip M. Prinz, Co-chair Professor Carla Hudson Kam Fall 2008
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Speech-Language Therapist Perceptions of Dialect and Risk for Disorder in African American English Speaking Children © 2008 by Pamela Carol Norton
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Abstract Speech-Language Therapist Perceptions of Dialect and Risk for Disorder in African American English Speaking Children by Pamela Carol Norton Doctor of Philosophy in Special Education with San Francisco State University University of California, Berkeley Professor Paul R. Ammon, Co-chair Professor Philip M. Prinz, Co-chair African American children have historically been disproportionately represented in special education categories, including in speech-language impairment. One reason cited for this disproportionality is biased assessment methods. In the field of communicative disorders the speech-language therapist (SLT) is considered the ultimate assessment instrument; therefore, the SLT needs to have working knowledge of the rulebased nature of the nonmainstream English (NME) speaker’s dialect and an unbiased attitude toward NME dialects. The present study explored SLT listener judgment of African American children’s dialectal variation and risk for disorder, and the effect of attitudes towards African American English (AAE) on SLT judgment of risk for language disorder. Twenty-two school SLTs completed survey questionnaires about language diversity and a subgroup of 10 SLTs viewed videotaped narratives of 6 African American children aged 4 to 8 years, using listener judgment rating scales to evaluate the children’s
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language behaviors. The children’s dialectal variation ranged from low- to high-density AAE and their language ability ranged from typical language to language impairment. SLTs listener judgment accuracy for dialectal variation and risk for disorder was below the expected 90%. Results indicate that SLTs have received more information about differential diagnosis of nonmainstream American dialect speakers in the last 5 to 10 years than SLTs who graduated more than 10 years ago. Descriptive statistics indicated that the more recently graduated SLTs had greater accuracy in dialectal variation and risk for disorder judgments. SLT evaluative comments demonstrated a frequent perception of AAE features as “incorrect language” or “incorrect grammar.” Descriptive statistical analysis indicated that bias against AAE led some SLTs to misjudge the typically developing high-density AAE speaker as language impaired, a type I error, while bias in favor of Mainstream American English led some SLTs to misjudge the language-impaired low-density AAE speaker as typically developing, a type II error. The data strongly suggest that unexamined bias toward AAE can have negative effects on SLTs’ ability to make accurate judgments about African American children’s language development. Recommendations are made for sociolinguistic training and intensive NME assessment practice in communicative disorders programs.
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Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to my supportive, patient, insightful, and loving daughter, Susanna Leila, who began this journey with me when she was only 7 years old and to the six great young storytellers who participated in this study, without whom it would not have been possible.
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Acknowledgments
Instrumental to this research project were the children, parents, and speechlanguage therapists who participated in this dissertation: thank you for the generosity of your time and efforts. Many thanks to my advisors and committee co-chairs, whose complementary advising styles got me through every important phase of this work, and who never gave up on me: Paul Ammon, Ph.D., who focused on substance first and editing later, and helped me develop the conceptual frameworks that guided this dissertation; and Philip Prinz, Ph.D., who wouldn’t let me quit, and whose careful reading and comments on my work have taught me so much about organization and structure. Thanks to Carla Hudson Kam, Ph.D., my outside committee member, who really understood my topic, gave me encouragement and support, and who said these very important words: “The best dissertation is a done dissertation!” Special thanks go to my academic mentor, Kristen Luker, Ph.D., who generously took me under her wing from the very beginning and gave me the benefit of her many years of social science research experience. I am forever grateful to my grandmother, Cheaber Hudson Farmer, who inspired me with her example: her fire for learning, her fierce commitment to social justice, and her determination to persevere at all odds. Her presence is with me always. Love and appreciation go to my mother, Frances McIntyre, for her ongoing support, her creative spirit, and for telling me when I was very young that I could be anything that I wanted. Thanks to my dad, Joe Norton, for being proud of me and always asking what he could do to help me on my journey. Much love and gratitude go to my
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sister Hasse Leonard-Pagel, who went before me on this dissertation path, my sister Kara de la Paz, videographer for this project, both of whom were always there for me with a ready ear, loving support, and total faith, and to their spouses, Leo Pagel and Michael de la Paz, who have been great supporters all the way. I couldn’t have completed this longterm project without the love and support of many family members, and the caring support and encouragement of all my friends, and my wonderful and heartwarming cheerleading section at my workplace, the Oakland Scottish Rite Language Center. Writing support came from Leslie Light, my editor, who has been a great gift to this harried writer, with a good eye for inconsistency and redundancy, Word expertise, insightful comments, and quick turnaround times. All of the following helped with writing, edifying discussions and moral support: Lisa Orlando, Grace Harwood, Shawn Usha, Karen Amende, Jane-Anne Staw, Dorothy Duff Brown, Jayne London, Russell Colver, and all my fellow and sister dissertation writers at Academic Ladder – having your support and feedback was a great asset to my endeavors. Key help also came from Beth Mistretta, Nicole Roach, Jose Zavaleta, Karen Draney, Ph.D., and research assistants Wanda and Loran. Finally, I have been amazed at the generosity and kindness of researchers-authors who didn’t know me but responded to my inquiries, above and beyond the call of duty — Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D., Cassandra Peters-Johnson, Ph.D., Holly Craig, Ph.D., Janna Oetting, Ph.D., and Gregory Robinson, Ph.D. — your dedication to helping others has pointed the way for me. Space and time do not allow me to name everyone who has supported me one way or another. It has taken an entire Universe to raise this Ph.D. I am so grateful for your love and kindness. Blessings to you all.
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Table of Contents Dedication
i
Acknowledgements
ii
Table of Contents
iv
List of Tables
vii
List of Figures
ix
List of Appendices
x
Chapter 1: Introduction
1
Background
1
Rationale for the Present Study
9
Listener Perception Studies in Communicative Disorders
13
Attitude Studies in Communicative Disorders
15
The Role of the SLT in Maintaining the Linguistic Status Quo
17
Research Questions
19
Methodology
20
Chapter 2: Conceptual Frameworks
23
Introduction
23
Definition of Terms
25
Conceptual Frameworks
36
Background of Language Assessment
49
8
Current Practice
65
Listener Perception and Language Attitude Studies
73
Summary
80
Chapter 3: Methods
81
Introduction
81
Speech-Language Therapist Participants
83
Instrumentation: SLT Data Collection
85
Child Participants
99
Production of the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument
112
Narrative Samples and Analyses
117
Summary
117
Chapter 4: Data Analysis and Results
119
Introduction
119
Child Participant Results
120
SLT Questionnaire Results
136
SLT Listener Judgment Results
146
SLT Evaluative Comments
157
Summary
164
Chapter 5: Discussion
166
Introduction
166
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Discussion of Research Questions and Results
166
Consideration of Findings with Regard to Existing Research Studies
177
Implications for Current Multicultural Assessment Training and Practice
181
Limitations of the Study
189
Recommendations for Future Research
192
Concluding Remarks
195
Appendices
198
References
243
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List of Tables
Table 1
Characteristics of SLTs
84
Table 2
Child Participant Characteristics
102
Table 3
Child Participant Demographics
103
Table 4
Dialectal Variation and Language Development Matrix
114
Table 5
Child Participant Characteristics
121
Table 6
DELV-NR Guidelines for Describing the Severity of a Language Disorder
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Table 7
Child Language Profiles per DELV Norm-Referenced Test
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Table 8
Dialectal Variation and Language Development Matrix per DELV-ST &
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DELV-NR Characterizations Table 9
Dialectal Variation and Language Development per Narrative Sample
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DDMs and DELV-NR Characterization Table 10
Summary of Child Narratives
125
Table 11
Most Frequently Used Phonological Feature Types listed in Descending
128
Order Table 12
Most Frequently Used Grammatical Pattern Types listed in Descending
129
Order Table 13
Phonological, Grammatical, and Total Child DDMs
130
Table 14
Speech-Language Therapist Sample Demographics
137
Table 15
Speech-Language Therapist Caseload Size
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Table 16
Recommended Multicultural Assessment Methods
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Table 17
Frequency of Information Sought on Topics of Language Diversity
141
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Table 18
Range and Means for SLT Risk for Disorder Ratings
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Table 19
Percentage of SLT Risk Rating Accuracy by Combination of Child
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Characteristics Table 20
Range and Means for SLT Dialect Ratings
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Table 21
Percentage of SLT Dialect Rating Accuracy by Combination of Child
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Characteristics Table 22
Combined SLT Perceived Dialect and Risk for Disorder Accuracy
150
Table 23
SLT Dialect Rating Accuracy for Mixed DDM Child Subjects
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Table 24
Child 1 — High Density Dialect/Typically Developing
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Table 25
Child 2 — Low Density Dialect/Typically Developing
154
Table 26
Child 3 — Low Density Dialect/Typically Developing
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Table 27
Child 4 — High Density Dialect/ (Mildly) Language Impaired
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Table 28
Child 6 — High Density Dialect/(Mildly) Language Impaired
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Table 29
Child 5 — Low Density Dialect/ (Moderately) Language Impaired
156
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List of Figures
Figure 1
Proposed African American Child Language Assessment Protocol
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List of Appendices
Appendix A: SLT Survey Questionnaire
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Appendix B: SLT Interview Protocol
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Appendix C: Listener Judgment Rating Scale - Risk for Disorder
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Appendix D: Listener Judgment Rating Scale Dialect
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Appendix E: Analysis of 1998 US Department of Education African American Speech-Language Impairment (SLI) Enrollment Data
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Appendix F: AAE Phonological Taxonomy
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Appendix G: AAE Grammatical Taxonomy
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Appendix H: Child 1: Combined Standard Orthographic and IPA Transcription
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Appendix I: Summary of Narrative Dialectal Features
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Appendix J: SALT Data for Child Participants
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Appendix K: SLT Perception Ratings and Accuracy per Child: Dialect
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Appendix L: SLT Perception Ratings and Accuracy per Child: Risk of Disorder
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Appendix M: Combined SLT Accuracy of Perceived Dialect and Risk for Disorder
239
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Chapter I: Introduction I.
Background In the United States, there is a long-standing history of the overrepresentation of
cultural and linguistic minority children in special education categories, while these minority groups are underrepresented in gifted and talented programs (Chinn & Hughes, 1987; U.S. Department of Education [DOE], 1997; Zhang & Katsiyannis, 1997; Ferri & Connor, 2005). Hosp and Reschly (2003, as cited in De Valenzuela, Copeland, Qi, & Park, 2006) give three main concerns regarding students inappropriately placed in special education programs: “ (a) potentially negative effects of stigmatizing labels; (b) restricted access to general education settings, especially for minority students; and (c) lack of conclusive evidence that special education programs are effective (p. 2).” Disproportionate representation of minorities in special education programs raises concern for educational equity for all minority children. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is a federal agency whose goals are to ensure equal access to education by enforcing civil rights laws and to prohibit discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, or disability. It collects civil rights data from educational institutions nationwide and publishes a bi-annual report called the “Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Compliance Survey.” From the late 1970’s until the early 1990’s, the agency monitored school enrollment and special education placement data by ethnicity to prevent disproportionate representation within several special education categories, including the speech-language impairment (SLI) category. Disproportionate representation is defined as “either a higher or lower percentage of students from a particular ethnic group in special education than is found in the general student population and has been well documented as both a historical and 15
continuing concern” (De Valenzuela et al., 2006, p. 425). Currently however, the OCR only monitors those categories that are determined to have “more of a likelihood of differentiation by race and ethnicity” (Schifferly, personal communication, 2008), including mental retardation, emotional disturbance, and learning disability. In their analysis of OCR data from 1978 to 1984, Chinn and Hughes (1987) stated that there did not appear to be disproportionate representation in the areas of SLI for most ethnic groups of concern. Within the above time span, African American students were found to be overrepresented in all special education categories except speech and language impairment, and were underrepresented in the gifted and talented category. However, there has since been some dispute over how to best track disproportionate representation. While in earlier years tracking methods looked at nationwide percentages of representation in each category relative to the ethnic group’s composition percentages, current prevailing methods use state and district level statistics to avoid misleading “averaging out” effects at the national level (Westat, 2004; Artiles & Rueda, 2002). In contradiction to Chinn and Hughes and OCR reports, analyses of US Department of Education data by Robinson (2006) and this researcher (Appendix E) indicate that African Americans are in fact disproportionately represented in the SLI category.
Disproportionate Representation and Communicative Disorders The field of communicative disorders has been concerned with over- and underrepresentation of African American and other cultural and linguistic minority students within the speech and/or language impairment category since the 1960’s (Taylor, 1986; Peters-Johnson & Taylor, 1986) when the Black caucus of the American Speech-
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Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) was formed (Taylor, Stroud, Hurst, Moore & Williams, 1969). Many researchers have demonstrated that most standardized and informal speech and language assessment methods and tests are biased in favor of White, middle-class cultural and linguistic norms, and thus are to be used with nonmainstream English speakers from other ethnic and class backgrounds with great caution, if at all (Reveron, 1983; Vaughn-Cooke, 1980; Stockman, 1996; Stockman, 2000). Furthermore, researchers have argued that biased testing materials and assessment methods can and do result in the misdiagnosis of typically developing African American English-speaking children as speech or language-impaired (Cole & Taylor, 1990), and of languageimpaired African American English-speaking children as having typically developing speech or language. These misdiagnoses are thought to result from a lack of knowledge of developmental and contrastive features of AAE (African American English) and Mainstream American English (MAE) and from negative attitudes against nonmainstream dialects. There are no known studies that examine the actual prevalence of misdiagnosis of African Americans in speech and language assessment, even though it is one of several assumed causes of disproportionate representation of African Americans in special education (DOE, 1997). While disproportionate representation has been partially attributed to inadequate training of evaluators and/or inaccurate evaluation materials and procedures (Hosp & Reschly, 2002), no studies have been carried out to confirm this suspicion in the area of communicative disorders. Regardless of the reasons, false diagnoses have far-reaching consequences for African American children. Those typically developing children who are inappropriately placed in speech and language services will suffer unnecessarily from
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the stigma of being labeled language impaired, including confusion about their own language abilities and lowered self-esteem, and the likely lowered academic expectations of teachers and other professionals in the schools according to their misdiagnosis. Those language-impaired children who are not provided with needed speech and language services will suffer from lowered academic potential due to unremediated language deficits. Either consequence is unnecessary and unacceptable. The concerns of researchers in the field of communicative disorders regarding overrepresentation of African Americans in the SLI category, however, led to the formation of the Committee on the Status of Racial Minorities (American SpeechLanguage-Hearing Association [ASHA], 1983a) which drafted the ASHA 1983 position paper published on “social dialects” (ASHA, 1983a) and its implications for the practice of speech-language assessment and intervention (ASHA, 1983b). The position paper stated that, “no dialectal variety of English is a disorder or pathological form of speech or language.” While it recognized that AAE, as well as other nonstandard dialects, are a “symbolic representation of the historical, social, and cultural background of the speakers,” it also recognized that in the United States there is a “linguistic idealization model of standard English” that is the preferred dialect for government, mass media, business, education, science and the arts. At the same time, nonmainstream dialects are often stigmatized and devalued. Therefore, NME speakers may choose elective speechlanguage “therapy” services to acquire Standard English, in which case SLTs may provide bidialectal instruction services. More importantly, the ASHA position on social dialects delineated the competencies required for a speech-language therapist (SLT) to work with
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nonmainstream dialect speakers and to make clinical decisions on their behalf. The SLT’s role in working with nonmainstream English (NME) speakers may include clinical services to those children who are “communicatively handicapped” as well as elective services to those who want to acquire competency in MAE. The SLT working with NME-speaking speech and/or language disordered children must have competency in distinguishing between dialectal differences and communicative disorders, such as “knowledge of the particular dialect as a rule-governed linguistic system, knowledge of the phonological and grammatical features of the dialects, and knowledge of nondiscriminatory testing procedures” (p. III-88, ASHA, 1983a). Furthermore, once a disorder has been diagnosed, the SLT is required to “treat only those features or characteristics that are true errors and not attributable to the dialect” (p. III-88). SLTs working with NME speakers who choose elective services to acquire MAE must have knowledge of the linguistic features of the dialect and linguistic contrastive analysis procedures, as well as sensitivity to the effects of attitudes towards dialects. Peters-Johnson and Taylor (1986), in one of the first books on speech and language in culturally and linguistically diverse populations, discussed two types of errors in diagnosis prevalent in the assessment of “children from nonwhite, non-middle class populations (p 161).” The Type I error is one of over-diagnosis, in which a child who speaks a non-Mainstream American English dialect is identified as having a speech or language disorder through the use of standardized tests normed “on a population other than his or her own.” A Type II error, under-diagnosis, is that in which a child who speaks a non-Mainstream American English dialect has a speech or language disorder but there are no assessment procedures that “provide a standard within the child’s own
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linguistic system against which normalcy or abnormalcy can be determined (p. 162).” It may also occur if the speech-language therapist “is unaware of the specific way the child’s dialect differs systematically from standard English and attributes any variance in the child’s linguistic system to the dialect that he or she speaks (p. 162).” Ultimately, the proposal of the ASHA position paper and numerous separate journal articles in the field was that “communication and communication disorders must be defined, studied, and discussed from a cultural orientation” (Peters-Johnson & Taylor, 1986, p. 158). In the case of African Americans in particular, “we must look carefully at the criteria used to determine pathology, the assessment instruments, and the standards within the particular Black community for determining normal speech and language behaviors” (Peters-Johnson & Taylor, 1986, p. 158). Rigorous training within communicative disorders programs regarding linguistic diversity is an area of slow and faltering progress (Stockman, Boult, & Robinson, 2003; Stockman, Boult, & Robinson, 2004), with arguably more development in the area of bilingualism and bilingual speakers than in the area of diverse American dialects and their speakers. In a study by Stockman, Boult, and Robinson (2004), the authors indicate that the root of the problem of training SLTs may be the fact that communication disorders program faculty themselves do not feel sufficiently well-versed in cultural and linguistic diversity issues to train their students, despite their firm commitment to linguistic and cultural equity. Because only 1.6% of all certified SLTs are African American (ASHA, 2007), the majority of SLTs do not have much experience with AAE. Thus, multicultural training is a vital competence for SLTs, especially those who work in urban school districts, where diversity is often the greatest. However, with regard to AAE
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speakers, my personal professional experience is that SLTs do not have access to nonbiased standardized testing materials, do not know enough AAE to conduct informal assessments such as language samples, and lack confidence about how to practice nonbiased assessment and diagnosis with African American children. What resources do urban public school SLTs then bring to the task of diagnosing speech and language impairments of African American children? For the most part, SLTs bring their own native experience with MAE and/or schooling in MAE-based educational institutions as well as their training in language development, assessment, and treatment of MAEspeaking children with them. From this basis, they are called upon to make judgments about all children, regardless of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Since MAE is the assumed national standard for our schools, commerce, and the workplace, it is not unusual that SLTs would take an MAE-based linguistic perspective. While a number of studies have examined the effect of teacher attitudes and expectations regarding minority children (Delpit, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1994), very few have looked specifically at the role of language attitudes and SLT bias in determining placement of culturally and linguistically diverse children. Communicative disorders attitude studies have tended to focus on the client with a communicative disorder, rather than on the SLT him or herself, much as anthropologists used to focus on “exotic others” in foreign countries rather than on Americans and their cultural practices or even on the anthropologists themselves and their own practices. In the field of communicative disorders it is especially important that we study the SLT and his or her beliefs and practices because the therapist her- or himself is considered the ultimate assessment instrument.
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My Position as an African American, Practitioner, and Researcher As an African American, a mono-dialectal MAE-speaker, an SLT, and a qualitative researcher, I wanted to gain insight into my own and other SLTs’ assessment processes with AAE-speakers. As a new practitioner working with the richly diverse population of San Francisco, more questions came from an acutely felt chasm between my MAE-based training and the more complex knowledge and skills needed to work properly with NME-speaking children. I was in the same position as many SLTs, the majority of whom have not been trained in differential diagnosis between typical and language impaired AAE speakers. I had had no coursework in sociolinguistics, American dialectal variation, or multicultural assessment, yet I had been cautioned to be “unbiased” when working with culturally and linguistically diverse clients. I had been given a list of typical adult AAE phonological and grammatical features that did not do justice to the dynamics of spoken AAE. I was puzzled as to how to even begin to sort out child AAE features from those of MAE language impairment features. As a researcher, I wanted to know if and how other SLTs were coping with the dilemma of inadequate training in multicultural assessment. As a person interested in social justice and transformation, I also wanted to know what might be done to change the situation to help SLTs and AAE-speaking clients alike. My experience was that many SLTs are aware of the need to make a distinction between AAE and MAE-based language impairment features, but that without the tools or training for differential diagnosis, they made do with the standardized tests available to them, and their best professional intuition, hoping they were reaching accurate conclusions.
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As a qualitative researcher, I wanted to start from the source, the practitioners themselves, who are the ultimate assessment tools, and experience with them their perceptions of AAE in typically developing and language impaired children. My research perspective is that of participant research in which the researcher and the participants both share common ground and can work together. In the process of viewing videotaped African American child narratives, we could explore together how they distinguish AAE and language impairment features, and could analyze what contributed to their conclusions. What I found was that both dialect perception and language attitudes were important factors in how SLTs in this study judged each child participant’s risk for language impairment. The present study was conducted out of a concern for those SLTs who feel as puzzled and concerned as I have for the past 15 years about how to cope with a lack of dialectal variation training while actively practicing with a very diverse caseload. These issues are intertwined with concern for the AAE-speakers who are at any given moment being inappropriately placed in or out of SLI services, and who, as a result, may suffer academically, socially, and emotionally from not receiving the education they deserve.
II.
Rationale for the Present Study While ASHA’s position statement on social dialects states that SLTs must have
“knowledge of [any social dialect] as a rule-governed linguistic system, knowledge of the phonological and grammatical features of the dialect, and knowledge of nondiscriminatory testing procedures,” many SLTs do not feel confident about their ability to differentiate language disorder from language differences in bilingual or NME
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dialect speakers. Furthermore, faculty in communicative disorders graduate training programs perceive themselves to have inadequate knowledge regarding multicultural assessment (Stockman, Boult, & Robinson, 2004). Interestingly, SLTs’ lack of knowledge of phonological and grammatical features in NME dialects, and of unbiased testing procedures, has been presumed but never actually studied. I addressed three main issues in this study: the specific requirements for conducting differential speech and language diagnoses with African American children; the preparation of SLTs to make differential diagnoses in AAE-speakers; and SLT language attitudes regarding AAE. Each of these issues is critical to the topic of speech and language assessment of NME speakers. ASHA and state professional bodies have supplied interested practitioners with competency and self-study guidelines for AAE assessment (ASHA, 1987; California Speech-Language-Hearing Association [CSHA], 1994, 2003). The literature on developmental AAE language data continues to grow and a multitude of alternative assessment methods have been suggested and even tested. One goal of the present study was to discover whether practicing school SLTs, who no longer have the benefit of direct clinical instruction and supervision, and who have the largest urban caseloads, have been able to study and assimilate knowledge of AAE that affords them competency to conduct unbiased assessment of AAE speakers. A second purpose of the present study was to investigate SLTs’ attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs about NME and NME speakers by examining the immediate experience of SLTs during their observation of African American children’s narratives.
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The present study began with the assumption that SLTs have not received the requisite university training in sociolinguistics, American English dialects, and multicultural assessment as required by ASHA (ASHA, 1987) for those SLTs working with NME population. The following questions will be addressed in this study: 1)
Are SLTs able to accurately differentiate between MAE and AAE dialects?
2)
Is there a meaningful pattern that emerges from accuracies and inaccuracies in dialectal perceptions?
3)
How accurate are the SLTs in judging risk for language disorder in AAE children?
4)
What patterns in dialect perception and risk for disorder judgments exist, if any?
5)
What kind of instruction did SLTs receive at the university level and after graduation in language diversity and multicultural assessment?
6)
What effect do university and post-graduate multicultural assessment method instruction have on SLT accuracy in dialect and risk for disorder ratings?
SLTs’ Perceived Competence to Work with Multicultural Populations It is important to consider the SLTs’ perspective of working with multicultural populations. Do SLTs feel that they are receiving sufficient training to conduct accurate language assessment of culturally and linguistically diverse children? A study conducted by Roseberry-McKibben and Eicholtz in 1994 indicated that SLTs did not feel confident
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about conducting assessment or intervention with bilingual children. This suggested that they were leaving university programs without sufficient or appropriate training for working optimally with second language learners. Ten years later, Roseberry-McKibben, O’Hanlon, and Brice (2004) conducted a follow-up study and found that SLTs still felt they lacked appropriate training for working with diverse populations. Similar findings were found in Kritikos’ (2003) study regarding levels of confidence in SLTs who were native bilinguals, academically trained bilinguals, and monolinguals. All three groups of SLTs responded that they experienced low personal efficacy “ even with the help of an interpreter, to assess an individual’s language development in a language that the SLPs (speech-language pathologists) did not understand or speak (p. 85).” Furthermore, most SLTs surveyed by Kritikos “reported low efficacy in bilingual assessment for both their own skills (personal efficacy) and those of the field in general (general efficacy)” (p. 73). A study by Kohnert, Kennedy, Glaze, Kan and Carney (2003) found that 39% of SLTs surveyed felt that they were not competent to assess and treat “bilingual/multilingual clients” and that “only half of the respondents (47%) had received any type of professional training aimed at increasing competencies with culturally and linguistically diverse clients.” These studies demonstrate that SLTs perceive themselves to be unprepared regarding knowledge of multicultural assessment and treatment procedures. The above survey studies emphasize the lack of training SLTs are receiving but do not get to the heart of the problems SLTs have with making assessments in multicultural populations. The present study employs a survey questionnaire followed up by qualitative comments from in-depth interviews and observations of SLT listener perceptions and attitudes to find patterns of practice that can illuminate how SLT
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knowledge and practice and efficacy can be improved in multicultural assessment of NME speakers. III.
Listener Perception Studies in Communicative Disorders Listener perception of dialect variation has been explored for several decades in
the area of social psychology (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, & Fillenbaum, 1960), and has often been combined with language attitude research (Garrett, Coupland, & Williams, 2003). It has also been the subject of research in linguistics and subfields of linguistics such as sociolinguistics (Labov, 1960) and perceptual dialectology, or folk linguistics (Preston, 1982; Niedzielski & Preston, 2003). With few exceptions, however, listener perception studies in communicative disorders have focused on the application of speech science to strictly perceptual issues such as the auditory perception in the hearing impaired (Pickett & Martony, 1970) and speech discrimination under varying listening conditions (Paul & Tosi, 1970). The listener perception studies in communicative disorders rarely address the connection between speech perception and social values as is common in sociolinguistic or social psychological studies. However, more recently there have been a number of studies of listener perception of dialects in the field of communicative disorders (Oetting & Macdonald, 2001; Oetting & MacDonald, 2002; Oetting & Garrity, 2006; Robinson, 2006). These studies either address NME phonological and grammatical patterns in children’s speech and language or SLTs’ perceptions of adult AAE, but not SLT perception of children’s NME speech and language. In Oetting and Macdonald’s 2001 study, Oetting and Macdonald (2002) and Oetting and Garrity (2006) looked at the dialect listener perceptions of linguistic students
27
and specialists who rated dialectal variations in typically and atypically developing children’s speech and language. In both the Oetting and Macdonald (2002) and the Oetting and Garrity (2006) studies, the listeners were doctoral students highly trained in dialectal variations and experienced in the perception and coding of NME dialects. While the studies shed light on the differentiation of one NME dialect from another, the listenerjudges’ knowledge of dialects is not comparable to the experience of most SLTs assessing the language of diverse populations. Robinson’s (2006) dialect perception study was the first to directly observe SLTs’ perceptions of AAE features. In his study, 16 public school SLTs in rural Michigan who had little or no exposure to AAE were asked to rate the comprehensibility and detectability of dialectal variation in sentences spoken in AAE and MAE. This study has valuable findings regarding the impact of frequency and perceptual salience on detectability and comprehensibility of dialect features, showing that presence of AAE dialect features has more weight in perception of dialectal variation than does frequency of dialect features. Furthermore, the SLTs found the increased use of unfamiliar AAE features hampered their comprehensibility of the speakers’ speech. Robinson found that AAE sentences with a high density of AAE features were perceived as less comprehensible, which could place high dialect density speakers of AAE at risk for being perceived as language impaired, especially by SLTs who are not familiar with AAE. However, because this study looks at adult AAE and MAE in typical speech and language, it does not address the dilemma faced by SLTs when trying to differentiate between the speech and language of typically and atypically developing AAE-speaking children during the assessment process.
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IV.
Attitude Studies in Communicative Disorders Communicative disorders attitude studies focus on the personal impact of
teacher, peer, and parent attitudes on clients with impaired speech, language, fluency, voice and /or hearing (Lalih & Rochet, 2000; Burroughs & Tomblin, 1990; Bramlett, Bothe, & Franic, 2006) rather than attitudes at the larger cultural or societal level. In more recent years, there have also been studies regarding attitudes of members of diverse cultures towards speech, language, and hearing disabilities (Huer & Saenz, 2003; Erickson, Devlieger, & Sung, 1999). The main concern in these studies is how attitudes towards the clients’ atypical speech and language behaviors can affect perceptions of clients as communicators. The few studies conducted by speech and language researchers regarding attitudes towards dialect are about teachers rather than SLTs. The earliest dialect attitude study within ASHA’s journals is by Frederick Williams (Williams, 1970). Williams used judgment scales with White and Black inner city teachers who evaluated speech samples of Black and White children of “varying social status.” He found that “deviations from standard English such as found in pronominal apposition, main verb constructions, and in the articulation of selected phonemes” and child race was a significant predictor in statusjudgment for White teachers but not for Black teachers. White teachers rated 9 of the 20 Black children, as opposed to 17 of the 20 White children, in the study as being in the “high status category,” and 6 of these Black children were rated as being White. Ultimately, Williams concluded, the White teachers equated “sounding White” with high socioeconomic status.
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Particularly relevant to the present study is Williams’ finding that “speech cues may elicit some type of general personality, cultural, or ethnic stereotype, and most of a teacher’s judgments draw from this stereotype rather than from the continuous and detailed variety of input cues (p. 486).” The White teachers more strongly equated standardness with linguistic effectiveness and social status than did the Black teachers, indicating that the Black teachers’ varied language experiences created greater sensitivity to both Black and White styles of speech and a greater ability to differentiate between standardness and linguistic competence. Taylor (1973), a communicative disorders professor and researcher at Howard University, also studied teachers. In a nationwide survey study of 186 teachers, Taylor found that most teachers had neutral or positive attitudes towards AAE and nonMainstream English. Furthermore, he found different attitudes towards dialectal variation according to the number of years of experience the teachers had. New teachers with less than 3 years of practice were less likely to show a positive attitude toward AAE, possibly because of “their uncertainty associated with entering the teaching profession and insecurity in trying radically different approaches.” On the other hand, teachers with more than 5 years of experience had more entrenched attitudes against AAE. Taylor concluded that teachers with three to five years of experience are a good population for trying out new classroom procedures and methodologies and “have probably been more exposed to recent thinking about language and cultural variety.” He also found that “specific educational procedures and materials [for working with non-MAE speakers were] unavailable [to the teachers]” (p. 197).
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Only one study prior to the present one has been conducted on the attitude and training of SLTs working in the public schools with regard to AAE. Bountress (1980) investigated treatment goals of SLTs of Southeastern Virginia working with AAE speakers and the felt need of SLTs for university coursework in social dialects. Bountress presented a survey questionnaire with three main statements, including: 1) “the grammatical and phonological features of black English should be replaced through the teaching of standard English to dialect speakers”; 2) “Black English should be generally accepted but the speaker of black English should be taught standard English”; and 3) “Black English should be unconditionally accepted with no attempt by educators to supplant it with standard English”. He found that 97% of SLTs agreed that AAE-speakers should retain their native AAE while learning MAE as a second dialect (answer number 2). Despite the consensus that SLTs should teach MAE to AAE speakers, only one-third of the respondents had obtained information regarding AAE during university coursework, a prerequisite for providing this elective service. More than two-thirds of the SLTs indicated the need for “formal coursework in social dialects” (p. 41) at the university level. The common thread in the Taylor (1973) and the Bountress (1980) studies is that teachers and SLTs experienced a lack of knowledge and expertise needed to work effectively with AAE speakers. V.
The Role of the SLT in Maintaining the Linguistic Status Quo It is important to look at how SLT practices are related to attitudes toward
standardness and nonstandardness in the United States in general, and in our educational institutions, in particular. Attitude studies regarding AAE in the United States demonstrate a consistent and persistent bias against NME dialects, and especially against
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AAE. The atmosphere in which SLTs operate has a clear bias in favor of “standard language” and against non-Mainstream American English dialects. Thus, pro-standard language attitudes are deeply rooted in our systemic structures, both personal and institutional. Standard English prescriptivism is prevalent in the schools and in speech and language assessment and therapy practices. Believing that MAE is the only “correct” English and that all other dialects are corrupted deviations from MAE is at the root of linguistic absolutism common in classroom teachers and SLTs alike. In her book Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Delpit (1995) demonstrated how linguistic prescriptivism interferes with effective teaching of AAE-speakers. Delpit (1995) showed that African American children’s reading instruction is negatively affected by teachers’ attitudes towards children’s use of AAE during lessons. One of the negative consequences of language bias against NME may be that an “affective filter is likely to be raised when the learner is exposed to constant correction” because dialect intervention is confused with reading instruction. The result may be “a school career of resistance and a lifetime of avoiding reading.” Equally negative consequences may result from the stigma and loss of self-esteem created by SLT intervention with dialects labeled as speech or language disorders. While SLTs are often pressed to adopt a position of language equity with regard to NME dialects by ASHA (ASHA, 1983a), communicative disorders programs, and school districts, and communicative disorders programs have received mandates from ASHA to prepare students for multicultural assessment and intervention (ASHA, 2004), there is no system of accountability or curriculum standards to enforce that mandate. Language biases may be responsible for conscious and unconscious resistance to
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changing from a linguistic absolutist position to a position of linguistic relativism. While linguists and even most teachers and SLTs agree with the premise of the acceptability and normalcy of non-Mainstream American English dialects, they are hard-pressed to find ways to express that acceptance within the MAE framework of standardized tests and curricula required for academic achievement. Moreover, unexamined negative attitudes toward AAE create lowered evaluations and expectations of its speakers. Language attitudes about non-Mainstream dialects are a critical area of inquiry in differential diagnosis methods application, since they almost certainly have a direct impact on the teaching, acquisition, and practice of language assessment techniques and on incorporating a linguistic diversity position into assessment and intervention practices within communicative disorders. VI.
Research Questions The initial purposes in conducting this quantitative-qualitative study were: 1) to
examine the “state-of-the-art” of SLTs’ knowledge of AAE dialectal variation features during the assessment of language competence of African American children; and 2) to evaluate SLTs’ accuracy in discriminating between the dialectal variation of AAEspeakers and features of language impairment. As the study evolved, SLT attitudes towards AAE and AAE-speakers emerged as a third important area of inquiry. I investigated four questions in the present study. The first set relates to how well SLTs feel that university and in-service training has prepared them to work with a culturally and linguistically diverse child population. These questions were addressed in the survey questionnaire administered at the beginning of the study to 22 participant SLTs through the school district, as well as during the interview conducted with 10 SLT
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participants later in the study. The overarching question being explored in this section can be summarized in this way: Is current SLT knowledge of AAE, as acquired during university training and afterwards, sufficient for SLTs to accurately differentiate between typical child AAE features and features of MAE-based language disorder? The specific research questions regarding SLT training were: 1)
Do SLTs feel they are being adequately prepared to work with culturally and linguistically diverse client populations?
2)
Are SLTs who graduated in the last 15 years more knowledgeable about assessment practices appropriate to use with AAE-speakers than those who graduated more than 15 years ago?
3)
Does greater exposure to AAE-speakers on speech-language therapists’ caseloads improve their knowledge of AAE phonological and grammatical features?
4)
Where do SLTs seek out knowledge about AAE after graduating from their university training programs and which do they consider to be most effective?
VII.
Methodology One methodological objective of this study was to gather demographic data on the
SLTs’ experience of university training regarding diversity. For this information I chose to use a convergent approach integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative instrument was a closed-ended survey questionnaire that presented precategorized questions on the topics of university preparation for diversity in communicative disorders practice, and demographic data, such as when the SLTs
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graduated and the size and ethnic compositions of their caseloads. This survey was used to give an overview of the experience of those SLTs with linguistically diverse caseloads. A second objective was to probe the SLTs’ ability to differentiate between developmental AAE and MAE. For this purpose, 10 SLTs were interviewed before and after viewing 6 child AAE-speakers’ narratives on videoclips using a semi-structured interview protocol. The questions raised in this phase of the research were designed to explore the SLTs’ perceptions of AAE features, and their differentiation of AAE features from features of language impairment, during and following the observation of child narrative videoclips (the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument, or AANEI). A separate instrument was created for the present study, which I labeled the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument (AANEI). The recorded narratives of 6 African American children participants with a range of language competence and dialectal variation from MAE were presented to the SLTs for their immediate impressions. In order to gather data on the SLTs’ knowledge of AAE phonological and grammatical features, the SLTs were audio recorded during their rating of the children’s language behaviors using ten-point listener judgment rating scales for dialectal variation and risk for disorder. The SLTs’ comments while watching and then rating the children’s narratives were also analyzed for their understandings of AAE and their attitudes towards MAE and AAE. A detailed description of the methodology used in the present study is provided in Chapter 3. The following chapter includes definitions of the terminology used throughout the present study, personal and conceptual frameworks that shaped the research, and a detailed review of pertinent literature regarding disproportionate representation of
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African American students in the SLI category, listener perception studies regarding dialects, and language attitudes studies regarding dialect and their impact on listener judgment.
Chapter 2: Conceptual Frameworks This chapter begins with an introductory statement about the speech and language assessment of diverse children as an area of concern in communicative disorders, followed by definitions of terminology used throughout the dissertation. The conceptual frameworks include my personal experience and history and conceptual frameworks that influenced the shaping of the present study. Theoretical concepts in developmental and social psychology, sociology, and sociolinguistics are brought to bear on SLT perception of dialectal variation and SLT differential diagnosis. A throughout review of the background of language assessment practices with culturally and linguistically diverse children is followed by a review of current practices. Thereafter, the chapter further discusses methodologies used in listener perception and language attitude research as they apply to communicative disorders. I.
Introduction The assessment of culturally and linguistically diverse children has been a
concern for the profession of speech-language pathology for more than twenty years. The American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) published a position statement on “social dialects” in 1983 in which it issued a mandate for SLTs to broaden their perspectives on “normal” child language development to include cultural and linguistic differences. Clinicians were encouraged to become aware of their linguistic and cultural
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biases and the negative effects these can have on the delivery of professional services as well as on the self-esteem and well-being of the diverse children they serve. In order to work with culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children, SLTs were instructed to acquire linguistic knowledge of the CLD children’s languages and/or dialects. Unfortunately, there was a paucity of language development data for children speaking NME dialects and languages other than English. Furthermore, there were no readily available methods for assessing the language of nonmainstream dialect speakers nor were there established assessment protocols for conducting differential diagnoses. It was hoped that with research into the linguistic development of NME speakers and other language speakers and with the development of alternative assessment methods and best practice protocols for use with diverse dialect and language speakers, SLTs would be able to acquire the necessary competences to work with CLD clients. Twenty-five years after the ASHA social dialects position paper (1983), there is much more research data available on the language development of CLD children, especially that of AAE-speakers (Kamhi, Pollock, & Harris, 1996; Stockman, 1986; Washington & Craig,1994; Craig, Thompson, Washington, & Potter, 2003). Alternative assessment methods (Stockman, 1992; Lidz & Pena, 1996; Stockman, 1996; Craig & Washington, 2000; Laing & Kamhi, 2003) and a number of assessment protocols have been put forth for use with NME children (CSHA, 1993; CSHA, 2003; Craig & Washington, 2000). Nonetheless, communicative disorders faculty continue to feel they have inadequate knowledge to instruct students regarding CLD language development and assessment (Stockman, Boult, & Robinson, 2004) and SLTs continue to feel that they have inadequate knowledge and skills to accurately conduct language assessments with
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CLD populations (Roseberry-McKibben, O’Hanlon, & Brice, 2004). Why is it that despite greatly increased data on nonstandard child language development, a plethora of alternative assessment methods, numerous protocols for assessing African American children, and several tests developed for evaluating CLD children (Seymour, Roeper, & deVilliers, 2003a: 2003b; 2005), SLTs continue to feel ill-prepared to evaluate children from diverse language backgrounds? That is the central question of this thesis: How is it that given all of the available resources SLTs have not made significant advances in the evaluation of CLD children, specifically African-American children? This study brings an interdisciplinary approach, including sociolinguistics, social psychology, perceptual dialectology, and critical social theory, to the analysis of the role of SLTs (SLTs) within the educational system, their positions as members of a larger social context, and the impact of a narrow cultural and linguistic perspectives in the teaching of communication disorders students. II.
Definition of Terms This section explores definitions of terms used throughout the text. It also gives
the rationale for preferences of terms used. Speech Language Therapist ASHA defines speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as those who work with “the full range of human communication and its disorders” including evaluating, diagnosing, and treating “speech-language, cognitive-communication and swallowing disorders…in individuals of all ages, from infants to the elderly” (ASHA, 2008). The standards of California State University at Fullerton require that in order to be granted the “preliminary speech-language-hearing services credential in language, speech and
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hearing” in the department of Communicative Disorders, the candidate must demonstrate “proficiency in screening and evaluation skills and the interpretation of test results, including procedures, techniques, and instrumentation used to assess the speech and language status of children and adults and the basis of disorders of speech and language” (California State University, Fullerton, 2007, p. 60). Furthermore, the candidate must exhibit “expertise in the administration of nonbiased testing techniques and methodologies for assessing the speech and language skills of linguistically diverse populations (i.e., speakers of second languages and dialects), including a language sample” (CSUF, 2007, p. 60). Speech-language pathologists are also called speech-language therapists, speechlanguage clinicians, or just clinicians. I use the term speech-language therapist, abbreviated to SLT in an effort to view the practice of speech-language therapy as broader than the commonly used medical model, a combination of art and science rather than a physical and mechanistic science. SLTs must complete a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in some states, and a master’s degree and/or clinical rehabilitative credential in many. Both undergraduate and graduate degrees cover speech, language, and hearing disorders. The vast majority of SLTs work in the public schools; some work in hospitals and nursing homes, and others operate from private practices.
Languages and Dialects Language is defined in the field of linguistics as “the abstract system underlying the collective totality of the speech/writing behavior of a community” (Crystal, 1991; p.
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193). It is defined in the field of communicative disorders as a “code whereby ideas about the world are expressed through a conventional system of arbitrary symbols for communication” (Lahey, 1988; p. 2). In linguistics, there is a distinction between langue and parole, the former meaning “the language system shared by a community of speakers” and the latter meaning “the concrete act of speaking in actual situations by an individual” (Crystal, 1991, pp. 193-4). Similarly, in communicative disorders, langue is called language, while parole is understood as speech. A dialect is a “regional, social, or ethnic variety of a language” (Wolfram, 1998, p. 107). Wolfram further states that, “The language differences associated with a dialect may occur on any level of language, thus including pronunciation, grammatical, semantic, and language use differences.” Wolfram (1998) makes clear, however, that the meanings of language and dialect are not always distinct. The term “language” is not always just used to distinguish linguistic systems that are “mutually unintelligible,” and the term “dialect” is not exclusively used to identify variations of a language that demonstrate “structural affinity.” Several so-called “dialects” of Chinese are mutually unintelligible, while Swedes and Norwegian can understand each other “languages” despite the cultural distinctions of the two groups of people. Dialectal variations of a language can develop as a result of “geographical barriers separating groups of people” but also where there are “divisions of social class” (Crystal, 1991). AAE did not develop in the United States due to geographic barriers so much as the result of social class barriers. All forms of English, including MAE, are dialects, despite the popular understanding that “dialects” are substandard or deviant forms of
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MAE. While the Linguistic Society of America holds that AAE, like all dialects, is a “systematic and rule-governed” speech variety (Linguistic Society of America [LSA], 1997), nonmainstream dialects of any language are often stigmatized. However, the stigma of NME is related to socioeconomic hierarchy and linguistic hegemony rather than inherent linguistic inferiority. ASHA (2003) addresses the nature of AAE and other NME dialects by stating the following: The type of English spoken in the United States is commonly referred to as American English (AE). AE includes social as well as regional dialects that are systematic, highly regular, and cross all linguistic parameters (i.e., phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, pragmatics, and suprasegmental features). Therefore, each represents a legitimate rule-governed language system. Dialects of AE include, but are not limited to African American English, Appalachian English, and Standard American English (SAE). Although each dialect has distinguishing characteristics, all share a basic core of grammatical features that are common to all varieties of American English (ASHA, 2003, p. 2). Dialectal Variation Dialectal feature variability is greater in the vernacular, or informal spoken language, of a dialect than in mainstream dialects, presumably because the mainstream dialect is standardized through print media. Rickford states that AAE demonstrates “systematic effects of style, age, gender, and linguistic environment” (Rickford, 1999, p. 10). The use of dialectal features also varies according to the degree of intimacy between the speaker and addressee and with the degree of formality of the situation in which speaker and addressee find themselves. Studies by Labov, Cohen, Robbins, and Lewis (1968) and Wolfram (1969) demonstrate that AAE phonological and grammatical feature use vary according to social class of the speakers. Furthermore, certain AAE variables are
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used more than others. For example, zero auxiliary, or the optional of use of “is,” as in “He_ working” is more common in any given AAE narrative than is zero plural, or optional use of the plural-s, as in “Give me two apple_” (Wolfram, 1969). Important to the present study, is the fact that in AAE-speaking children old enough to have become bidialectal in AAE and MAE may strive to alter their speech toward the mainstream dialect with teachers and SLTs who speak MAE. Hester (1996) also demonstrated that a child’s use of dialectal features in any given narrative may vary according to what the role the child is assuming as the narrator.
Standard Language Ideology An ideology is defined by Lippi-Green as “the promotion of the needs and interests of a dominant group or class at the expense of marginalized groups, by means of disinformation and misrepresentation of those non-dominant groups” (her italics, p. 64). The term standard language ideology originated with James and Lesley Milroy (1991, 1st edition). Milroy and Milroy (1999) state that the concept of the standardization of a language is itself an ideology since the term standard language is “an idea in the mind rather than a reality – a set of abstract norms to which actual usage may conform to a greater or lesser extent” (p. 19). Lippi-Green’s upgraded definition of standard language ideology is “a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions [e.g., school systems] and which names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class” (p. 64). Furthermore, Lippi-Green states, “a standard language ideology which proposes that an idealized nation-state has one perfect,
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homogenous language, becomes the means by which discourse is seized, and provides rationalization for limiting access to discourse” (pp. 64-65).
Standard and Nonstandard Dialect vs. Mainstream and Nonmainstream Dialect The terms standard and non-standard are avoided in the present study unless the desired connotation refers to how others use standard language ideology — standard language is correct and proper language and nonstandard language is substandard, or somehow deviant from the norm and deficient. Otherwise, I follow Lippi-Green’s use of the terms mainstream and nonmainstream. Lippi-Green (1997) states that mainstream language is used to mean language used by speakers: …in communities and institutions which rely on formal education systems to prepare children for participation in the community. Nationally, these speakers are perceived as living primarily in the midwest, far west, and some parts of the east and/or as upper middle class or upper class, as literate, school-oriented, and as aspiring to upward mobility through success in formal institutions. They look beyond the primary networks of family and community for sociolinguistic models and values orientations (p. 61). Conversely, nonmainstream language refers to that used by speakers: …in communities and institutions which rely less on formal education systems to prepare children for participation in the community. Nationally, these speakers are perceived as living primarily in the far south and inner urban centers, and/or as working class or lower class, as less interested in literacy or school, and as aspiring to local rather than supranational success in formal institutions. They tend to stay within networks of family and community for sociolinguistic models and value orientations (p. 61). I prefer to use Mainstream American English (MAE) and Nonmainstream American English (NME), whenever possible, because these terms acknowledge the social acceptance by Americans of what is usually called “standard” and rejection of “nonstandard” as just that – socially-biased perspectives about the two types of dialect that are accepted in the mainstream rather than any innate truth about those dialects.
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Lippi-Green’s definitions of mainstream and nonmainstream also point to the connection between language, education and literacy, and power and authority in the United States. Furthermore, her definitions point to the effect of different social orientations towards, or beyond, family and community on attitudes about language use.
Mainstream American English Mainstream American English, also known as Standard American English, General American English, or Network English, is the language of American people “whose position or social status makes their judgments about language use more influential than those of others,” such as teachers and employers, “generally professionals and others in the educated middle-class” (Wolfram, Adger, & Christian, 1999, pp 16-17). Green (2002) prefers to call this language “classroom English” which she defines as “specific standards…established for language use in classrooms” which are “established norms of English use” (p. 76). MAE is the preferred language variety of American English in the United States and facilitates social mobility. The fact that MAE is the language of the classroom is important because it is against this standard that African American children’s language is judged in the schools. Teachers commonly use MAE as a basis for comparison to African American children’s speech and language when referring African American students for speech and/or language evaluation.
African American English African American English (AAE) is described by most linguists as a dialectal variation of American English similar to Southern English, Appalachian English, and
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others. Other researchers argue that it is a distinct language whose syntax is based on West African language groups with only an English lexical overlay (Williams, 1970; Smith, 1997). AAE has been known by many different labels over time, including Negro dialect, Black English Vernacular (BEV), and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). It has also erroneously been referred to as slang, street language, or even “broken English.” The common misunderstanding of AAE as a “degraded” form of MAE is partly a byproduct of generally low social status of African Americans whose foremothers and fathers were forced into slavery in America. AAE is most prevalent among working class African Americans, however, approximately 80 percent of African Americans speak AAE to some degree (Dillard, 1970). As John Rickford (1999, p. 9) has stated “[n]ot every African American speaks AAVE, and no one uses all of the features…100 percent of the time.” Lippi-Green (1997) argues, however, that “while core grammatical features of AAVE may be heard most consistently in poorer black communities where there are strong social and communication networks, AAVE phonology (particularly intonation) and black rhetorical style are heard, on occasion, from prominent and successful African Americans in public forums” (p. 178). Whereas Black English and African American English refer to a broad spectrum of speech and language patterns in the language of African Americans, BEV and AAVE refer to the more informal language patterns within Black English or African American English. Ebonics, a term coined by a group of African American scholars (Williams, 1975) to refer to “the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and
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United States slave descendant of African origin.” African American Vernacular English is a narrower term than African American English, and Ebonics is both broader and outside the scope of English altogether, including American English. The frequency of use of dialectal features in AAE can be measured by comparing the number of AAE features in a narrative to the total number of words in that narrative. This type of measurement is called dialect density measurement (DDM), a term coined by Washington and Craig (1994, 1998). AAE speakers are characterized by the level of density of AAE features, as high-density AAE speakers or low-density AAE-speakers. In dialect density measurement, the collective AAE feature use across a sample of narratives is used to determine a mean of AAE feature use. Those speakers whose AAE feature use is at the mean or below are considered to be low-density AAE speakers, whereas those speakers whose AAE feature use is above the mean are considered to be high-density AAE speakers. The actual DDMs for any given sample group will vary according to factors such as age, gender, grade-level, and socioeconomic status of the speakers.
Language Competence, Language Proficiency, and Communicative Disorders Language competence is defined as a “speakers’ knowledge of their language, the system of rules which they have mastered so that they are able to produce and understand indefinite number of sentences, and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities” (Crystal, 1991, p. 66). Language competence in one dialect should not constitute language incompetence in another dialect. Monodialectalism does not constitute a language disorder any more than monolingualism does. Children who are linguistically
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competent in their native dialects should not be considered language disordered in any other dialect, although they certainly may not be proficient in the second dialect. Language proficiency refers language competence in an acquired language. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages defines language proficiency as “learners’ functional competency, that is, their ability to accomplish linguistic tasks representing a variety of levels ” (Breiner-Sanders, Lowe, Mile, & Swender, 1999, p. 13). The limited English proficiency student is one who “has sufficient difficulty speaking, reading, writing, or understanding the English language and whose difficulties may deny such an individual the opportunity to learn successfully in classrooms where the language of instruction is English or to participate fully in our society” (Breiner-Sanders et al., 1999). Communicative disorders cover the span of difficulties or problems that can occur in human communication. The sources of communicative disorders can be congenital (specific language impairment, metabolic disorder, anoxia during birth), or acquired after birth (respiratory disorders, toxins, trauma). Communicative disorders can be primary, meaning that they are not attributable to another, broader condition, or secondary, meaning that the communicative disorder is directly attributable to, and part of, a larger condition, such as mental retardation or autism. Communicative disorders are defined as impairments in “the ability to (a) receive or process a symbol system; (b) represent concepts or symbol systems; or (c) transmit and use symbol systems” (Nicolisi, Harryman, & Kreschek, 2003, p. 77). Although communication difficulties are often interchangeably referred to as “delays,”
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“deviances,” “disabilities,” “disorders,” or “impairments,” each word has different meanings and connotations, and it is important to examine the differences between them. A language delay, for example, “implies that the client’s language is just like that of a younger child and that the ‘delayed’ child will…eventually arrive at…normal development” (Paul, 1995, p. 9). A deviance suggests that there is something qualitatively different about the child’s language development, not just that it is slower than average. Paul (1995, p. 9) suggests that the term “language delay” be avoided because we cannot be certain that an atypically developing child’s language is simply delayed but following a “normal” course. By the same token, the term “language deviance” should be avoided because a child may develop in a typical fashion in one area of language and in an atypical fashion in another area. Paul recommends the use of the term “language impairment” meaning that “there is some difference between the child with an impairment and other children,” as the most neutral of all the labels. She also suggests that “disorder” has a similar meaning and can be used interchangeably. Disability on the other hand, is a term that has additional connotations, and relates to the impact that the impairment has on the child’s ability to function in the world. The terms language impairment and disorder will be used here to describe differences in language comprehension and/or production that create a communication disability for the child. A speech disorder refers to “difficulties producing speech sounds” and often refers to articulation problems, such as when a child continues to substitute /w/ for /r/ after most peers have acquired the /r/ sound. It can also refer to “problems with voice quality,” such as hoarseness, or problems with speech fluency, such as stuttering. A
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phonological disorder is an “impaired comprehension of the sound system of a language and the rules that govern the sound combinations” (ASHA, 1993b). A language disorder is “any disruption in the learning or use of one’s native language as evidenced by language behaviors that are different from (but not superior to) those expected given a child’s chronological age” (Lahey, 1988). Additionally, this must be considered within the social context of the child’s language community. Another definition for language disorder is “any difficulty with the production and/or reception of linguistic units, regardless of the environment, which may range from total absence of speech to minor variance with syntax; impairment in the ability to understand and/or use words in context, both verbally and nonverbally” (National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities [NICHCY], 2004).
III.
Conceptual Frameworks
My Personal Experience and History As a person of color of African American, White, and Native American backgrounds, and having lived in different countries, I have a unique perspective on social, cultural and linguistic differences. As a person of mixed ethnic background, I was not always perceived as African American, though having an African American mother and White father in the United States meant I was officially African American. Living in Detroit, Michigan and Northern California as a child, I was very aware of being thought of as speaking “differently” in one place or the other as I shifted my dialectal patterns. Having grown up in a Mainstream American English speaking family, but a multicultural, mostly immigrant neighborhood, I was often corrected if I used other
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dialectal patterns and I learned early on to speak “proper” English. African American children at school chided me because I talked “White” and seemed to think I was “special.” Growing up with three cultures in my heritage and living in predominantly White and then predominantly Black neighborhoods in my immediate present, I never felt I actually belonged completely in any of them. It may have been this ambiguous situation, combined with being raised in a family with an intellectual, agnostic, and relativistic mindset, that led me to view the world as being complex and multilayered rather than bipolar, a place where “black or white” thinking did not make sense, and most perspectives were relative to one’s own experience. When I reached the communicative disorders degree program in my late twenties, I found it difficult to accept the argument about “nurture” or “nature.” It was clear to me that it was both “nurture” and “nature” that formed people and their perspectives and developments. I also knew that for me it was impossible to know a people and their language through textbooks and a list of characteristics. In my communication disorders programs in 1983, students were taught about cultural diversity in just this way. Each area of study was presented as a whole with a multicultural “addendum” at the end. Practica did not take linguistic and cultural differences into account and assessments were conducted in the standard fashion with MAE-based standardized tests. At the time, I was only disturbed by the generalizations being made about “African Americans, Mexicans, and Caucasian cultures” as though there was one set of characteristics that applied to every person in each ethnic/linguistic group.
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It wasn’t until I graduated from the master’s degree program and proceeded to work to complete my clinical fellowship with Head Start children in San Francisco that I realized how woefully unprepared I was to work with culturally and linguistically diverse children. It was my job to screen preschool children from a great variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds using one standardized speech and language screening instrument, the Fluharty Preschool Speech and Language Test. When I asked my supervisor about culturally and linguistically appropriate testing materials, he told me there were none, but that I was welcome to devise my own method of assessment as I saw fit. I was completely out of my depth, and concerned that I was doing more harm than good in pronouncing children typically developing or language disordered. I took this concern about language judgments regarding CLD children into my early years as a practitioner. I made sure to use standardized tests with rubrics for alternative scoring of CLD children’s language, but found them to be inadequate and incomplete. At one point I tested an African American boy with the standardized test norms and then with the alternative rubric and got two completely different diagnoses: “disordered” and “normal.” I wondered how many other speech-language therapists were confronted with the same dilemma I had: I was aware of potential bias in my method of assessing diverse children but I had not been trained to conduct differential diagnosis. I only knew how to use standardized tests, most of which were MAE-based. While I knew how to collect a language sample, I was not at all confident I could analyze Chineseinfluenced English, Spanish-influenced English, or even African American English features as such, despite my ongoing interest in the latter and constant study of it in my doctoral program. I began to read about the overrepresentation of African American
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children in many areas of special education and wrote my first position paper on the misdiagnosis of AAE-speaking children. Out of that first paper came my decision to study SLTs’ judgment of AAE-speaking children’s language. Influences from Developmental Psychology, Sociology, and Sociolinguistics The main influences in the formation of my conceptual frameworks have evolved from readings in sociolinguistics and dialectology (Niedzielski & Preston, 2003; Wolfram, 1998) and their treatment of language use within social structure. Sociology clearly influences sociolinguistics, and Bourdieu’s treatment of the symbolic power of language in both laypeople and professionals (Bourdieu, 1991) is a potent analysis of how individuals respond to their larger environments, especially to the ideology of standard language. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory provides a container for some of Bourdieu’s concepts of power and language at the micro and macro levels and how they interact and inform or sustain social hierarchies and each other. Piaget’s treatment of the construction of knowledge (Droz & Rahmy, 1972) provides useful concepts about what humans do with new knowledge that doesn’t fit into their previous schema of language (assimilation vs. accommodation) which applies easily to how SLTs, and the field of communicative disorders, might be responding to the linguistic diversity challenge to the status quo of standard language. The common thread amongst all these conceptual frames is that they take social context to be an integral and essential ingredient in the consideration of people’s perceptions, understanding, and interpretation of the language behaviors of others. These researchers and theorists’ frameworks have shaped my perspective of why and how SLTs’ larger social
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environments might influence perception and evaluation of dialectal variations from MAE and thus, the risk for disorder of AAE-speakers. My experience in communicative disorders training led me to question why university programs have not developed, practiced, and taught its students a clear and practicable protocol for multicultural, nondiscriminatory assessment. It seemed to me that this was partially due to 1) an old paradigm regarding “normal” language in which standard language was the gold standard for communicative competence, and 2) the field’s difficulty in integrating the notion of linguistic diversity as an inherent and core quality of human language. It is true that the communicative disorders field relied, and still relies, heavily on standardized assessments to make diagnostic evaluations, and in the 1980s not much developmental research data existed on NME speakers. Nonstandardized assessments were relatively new and held with some suspicion because they lacked norms. Language sample analysis, another mainstay of language assessment, can only be accomplished with developmental data on the population whose language was being analyzed. Therefore, lack of developmental data on NME speakers hampered language sampling as well. Nonetheless, my hypothesis about the reason for the lack of actual practical steps to improve assessment validity for NME speakers is more basic than the barriers to normal operating procedures in the field. Lack of more than superficial knowledge of the dialects is part of the problem, but perhaps a more fundamental problem is the fact that communicative disorders, as part of the larger institution of education, and as part of a hierarchy of social relationships related to different dialects and the people who speak
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them, adheres to a standard language ideology. Furthermore, a Chomskyan, grammarbased understanding of language and language competence focuses on the internal abilities of the individual and so limits the perception of language as part of a larger network of social relationships. Current linguistic science understands linguistic diversity and variation to be an integral part of language. However, the field of communicative disorders appears to be operating from a Chomskyan understanding of grammar based on “an idealized speakerlistener in a homogeneous speech community” (Coulmas, 1998, my italics). Furthermore, Chomsky’s theory dismisses all concern with variation in language by focusing exclusively on “competence” in “language,” not its actualization in “speech.” Sociolinguists on the other hand, acknowledge that the scope of communicative competence is not complete without an idea of the speaker/listener operating “as a full member of a language community” (LePage, 1998, p. 20). By treating linguistic diversity - dialectal variations or multilingualism - as an exception to the rule of language, or an addendum to theory of language acquisition and development, rather than as central to study of language, the communicative disorders field leaves the impression that language diversity is not an inherent and critical part of language development, partly because of its focus on language within the individual rather than within a language community or larger society. In this way, language diversity is seen as marginal to language theory and to the professional practices in assessment. Piaget’s Constructivist Learning Theory: Assimilation vs. Accommodation
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Piaget’s constructivist theory of learning is one way to interpret the incomplete acceptance of a basic tenet of modern linguistic science: linguistic diversity and variation as a fundamental fact of language form, content, and use (Lahey, 1988). Piaget’s theory of constructivism looks at the mechanisms by which knowledge is constructed by learners. The field of communicative disorders, including faculty and students, researchers and theorists, can be looked at as potential learners of current linguistic theory. Sociolinguistics, in particular, holds that all dialects are equally valid and functional language systems for the communities in which they arise. However, while ascribing to multicultural perspectives on language since the 1980s, the field of communicative disorders as a whole has yet to incorporate the concept of linguistic diversity into its theories of child language development or into the teaching of assessment practice, with few exceptions (Stockman, Boult, & Robinson, 2004). Piaget’s term assimilation is defined as “the process of interpreting reality in terms of a person’s internal model of the world (based on previous experience)” (assimilation, 2008). On the other hand, accommodation represents the changes one makes to that model through the process of adjusting to life’s experiences” (accommodation, 2008). It can be said that the new ASHA position on social dialects (ASHA, 1983) put pressure on communicative disorders faculty and SLTs to adapt to a new understanding of normal language and child language development and to include that understanding in the actual assessment practices of clinical language assessment practica. However, perhaps the motivation to make the adaptation was not strong enough to lead to accommodation and instead resulted in a kind of assimilation. The idea of AAE as “normal language” was brought into a previously established general schema of
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language that was based on child MAE norms. The subsequent “inclusion” (Stockman, Boult, & Robinson, 2004) into the curricula of communicative disorders was more of a marginalized acceptance of AAE than a full re-organization of the schema for normal child language development as it is taught in university programs, which Stockman, Boult, and Robinson (2004) would call an “infusion” model. At the same time that accommodation of the reality of language diversity has not occurred in any practical way, the idea that dialectal variations from MAE should not be penalized in language assessment of linguistically diverse speakers appears to be clearly assimilated as doctrine by most SLTs and communicative disorders faculty and has been demonstrated in a number of studies (Bountress, 1987; Kritikos, 2003; Stockman, Boult, & Robinson, 2003). Yet SLTs are not provided with multicultural content and assessment coursework that would allow them to navigate language diversity in their practice after graduation. The split between the acceptance of language diversity as normal and the lack of practical knowledge of the nondiscriminatory methods needed to account for linguistic diversity during diagnosis seems to indicate that universities are doing a good job of indoctrinating SLTs with the assimilation of linguistic diversity. It seems, however, that the internal representation of typical language development as standard language has been left untouched. If that is the case, that would mean that the acceptability and normalcy of dialectal variation is currently assimilated by SLTs and is seen as “unimportant information” with regard to assessment practice. Thus, SLTs may not have accommodated language diversity within society as part of their representation of “normal” or “healthy” language development.
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According to Piaget’s concept of accommodation, the field of communicative disorders would have to learn a new paradigm of what is “proper English,” to accommodate diverse experiences of language form, content, and use, and the understanding that what is “different” from MAE equates with “deviant language.” That is to say, SLTs’ understanding of what constitutes “normal language” has to be reconstructed. Otherwise, when the language behavior of “others” violates our expectations, we will fail those AAE-speakers by testing them with MAE-based tests and “remediating” AAE language structures, a violation of the ASHA social dialects position statement (1983). However, if we can learn from our experiences of failure in accurately assessing and intervening with AAE-speakers, we might accommodate the experience of failure into a new model of language as inherently diverse across social contexts. Dialectal awareness and awareness of our language attitudes toward the unfamiliar language patterns is necessary in order to be able to enact nondiscriminatory assessment practices. It can be said that communicative disorders programs have failed to adequately prepare SLTs to evaluate NME dialect speakers in a non-discriminatory manner. As a result, the field of communicative disorders, and the SLTs it produces, are most likely part of the problem of overrepresentation of AAE-speakers in the special education category of speech-language impaired. The consequences of our failure to accommodate linguistic diversity into our understanding of typically developing child language, and thus into our assessment and diagnostic practices, are that AAE and other NME speakers may be seen as language disordered. On the other hand, some SLTs, acutely aware of their lack of preparation to make differential diagnoses between language difference and language disorder in NME speaking population, may err on the side of nondiscrimination
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by assuming that all NME speakers are simply language different, without examining the possibility that they may be also language disordered. The position that dialectal variations that differ from our expectations are always language difference does harm to those NME-speakers who are in need of speech-language therapy to help them communicate socially and succeed academically. Ecological Systems Theory and the Symbolic Power of Language Applied to SLTs’ Position towards Dialectal Variation Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory is a useful framework within which the needs of SLTs can be categorized and understood. Bronfenbrenner took a socioecological approach to how individuals’ behaviors are situated within past, present, and changing conditions (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). He argued in favor of going beyond the mere direct observation of human behaviors within one setting to examine the multiple systems of interaction through which the individual acts or performs, including the larger environment in which the immediate situation is contained, from the exosystem which indirectly shape the individual through the ideologies of a society, to the microsystem, such as the family or school in which the individual is directly taught attitudes and practices. Each environment, the microsystem, macrosystem, and exosystem, is “nested” in another system, and all of them interacting with each other, much like a biological system. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory applies to SLTs and their attitudes towards language norms. They are raised within family and school system with cultural norms that are taken for granted as absolute truths, including those about language. It is a
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useful theory for discussing the factors that influence SLTs’ understanding of AAE as a legitimate English language variation or as a degraded or deficient version of MAE. The position of SLTs vis-à-vis MAE and NME and their speakers is a socially and ecologically situated one. Most SLTs are White, presumably middle class, native speakers of MAE, and college-educated (ASHA, 2007). As such they belong to the group of mainstream speakers referenced in Lippi-Green (1997) who are “literate, schooloriented and aspire to upward mobility through success in formal institutions” (LippiGreen, p. 61). It is safe to say that by virtue of membership or aspiration to membership in the mainstream group of literate, school-oriented individuals, most SLTs’ position regarding MAE is one of alliance and allegiance, whether consciously or unconsciously. Further, mainstream families and informal social networks consider MAE to be the “proper” way to speak American English, and this attitude toward MAE is strongly reinforced by elementary and secondary school teachers. SLTs, growing up, living and working in, and being completely embedded in the society at large, hold all of the same language attitudes of the society at large, their individual environments mirroring and reinforcing the language attitudes held within microsystems of family, school, and community sites of. Each SLT and the education institutions and workplaces following a “blueprint for society” regarding acceptable language form, content and use. The language ideology of a society and the language attitudes that language ideology engenders, is transposed to individuals as an implicit, informal sense of the “normality” of standard language, in this case MAE, and the dissonant, abnormal, discomfiting aspects of nonstandard language, in this case AAE. Bourdieu’s (1991) notion of habitus, or a “set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain
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ways” demonstrates the relationship between the environment and the individual within a it, in that the practice, learned as a child, of using and being rewarded for using standard language in multiple settings would an example of ideology embodied as “practices, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘regular’ (Thompson, 1991, p. 12). What one is used to is what is “right.” Bourdieu states that the sense of legitimacy and “rightness” is particularly evident in language, especially as it is mediated through formal educational institutions. The sense of standard language “rightness,” compounded by the multiple settings that the individual inhabits, is a powerful factor in the speaker of any dialect with regard to unfamiliar language patterns. In the case of the SLT who is judging the language development of an NME-speaker, it can be difficult to understand the enactment of NME dialect as normal speech and language, in spite of injunctions to accept it as the outcome of a “legitimate, rule-governed system.” Speech-language therapists, like all Americans, are members of U.S. society that largely subscribes to a standard language ideology. Standard language ideology, especially when unconscious, most likely interferes with the accurate differential diagnosis between language difference and language disorder. SLTs would have an unconscious but immediate reaction against AAE syntax and phonology features that contrast with those of MAE. Lack of knowledge of AAE language systems would only exacerbate negative attitudes towards NME dialect differences because these would be seen strictly as “not MAE” and thus “not normal.” Bourdieu’s perspective on language as social and cultural capital is another important factor in SLTs’ positions toward NME dialectal variation. SLTs operate within a larger context, and within several fields of practice: as members of families and
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communities, as practitioners in the field of communicative disorders, as stakeholders in educational institutions, and as citizens of the United States. By virtue of their place in the social ecology of the U.S., SLTs have both the linguistic capital of speaking MAE and the social capital of being an education professional empowered to evaluate others. These are mutually reinforcing roles. For SLTs accepting the legitimacy of NME endangers and dilutes their capital on both fronts as it requires that they rely on nonprofessionals, parents and community members, for evaluative assistance and that they challenge the standard ideology of the educational workplace, that MAE is “normal” language. Sociolinguistics and Folk Linguistics: SLTs as Folk Linguists Sociolinguistics is a “meeting ground for linguistics and social scientists, some of whom seek to understand the social aspects of language while others are primarily concerned with linguistic aspects of society” (Coulmas, 1998). A major area of sociolinguistic research is the social evaluation of linguistic features, which is of direct interest in the present study. Wolfram (1998) states that, “[a]lthough there is no inherent social value associated with the variants of a linguistic variable, it is not surprising that the social values assigned to certain groups in society will be attached to the linguistic forms used by the members of these groups” (p. 120). Specific language variants can be evaluated as being high prestige or low prestige, and they come by their status levels by virtue of being associated with high or low-status groups. Norms of linguistic behavior are traditionally established by groups with higher status and are perpetuated through institutions, especially educational institutions, the media, and other language behavior authorities, including SLTs (Wolfram, 1998, p. 122).
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Folk linguistics, as defined by Niedzielski and Preston (2003) is the study of “beliefs about, reactions to, and comments on language by…‘real people’ (i.e., nonlinguists)” (p. vii). Folk is defined as “those who are not trained professionals” in scientific linguistics. Folk linguistics contrasts the beliefs about language of folk linguistics and scientific linguistics, within a larger framework of culture. Furthermore, Niedzielski and Preston hold that “folk belief is simply belief, its folk character being no indication of its truth or falsity” (p. xviii). Folk linguistics is largely the study of attitudes towards different language variables. SLTs are perfectly situated at the crossroads of sociolinguistics and folk linguistics. While they are trained in certain aspects of scientific linguistics, especially phonetics and morphology, they are not trained in linguistic analysis, by and large, beyond the analysis of the forms of speech and grammar. Moreover, SLTs are generally not formally trained in dialect awareness or in the importance of the social location of MAE with regard other dialects. Given a low dialect and sociolinguistic awareness, it is my position that SLTs can generally be characterized as folk linguists. Preston and Niedzielski state that “[w]hen professionals want to have influence, they are…ill-advised to ignore popular belief, and…popular belief about language is both ubiquitous and strong” (p. xvii). It is a key argument of this thesis that SLTs would be well served by exploring their own attitudes of language normalcy and embracing an identity as both a professional in the field of speech therapy and a layperson in the field of linguistics to best serve their communities and to make their language assessment practices more inclusive.
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IV.
Background of Language Assessment Clinicians and researchers have been aware of the difficulties and problems with
assessing nonstandard dialect speakers and second language learners with standardized instruments based on MAE speaking, monolingual children. Many proposals exist for alternative (Lidz & Pena, 1996) and informal assessment methods such as creating separate scoring rubrics for existing language tests (CELF, Semel, Wiig & Secord, 2004), creating local norms for tests, and using language samples. However, many clinicians had inadequate information on diverse language development and language features and thus were unable to analyze the data they collected on children who spoke different dialects from their own. As a result, researchers in the field recognized an urgent need for research on the language development of children speaking nonstandard dialects and diverse languages. A number of researchers rose to the challenge of researching African American English (AAE) speaking child language development (Washington & Craig, 1994; Washington & Craig, 1998; Seymour & Seymour, 1981; Wyatt, 1996; Ball, 1992; Stockman, 1996b). Several protocols for assessing African American children were developed (CSHA, 1994; Craig & Washington, 2000; Laing & Kamhi, 2003). Ultimately, Seymour, Roeper, and deVilliers (2005) developed a standardized test normed primarily on African American children. Interestingly, Stockman, Boult, and Robinson (2003), in a survey of speechlanguage and audiology university curricula conducted with communication sciences and disorders professors nationwide, found that these facilities spend a limited amount of time on multicultural issues in assessment and intervention, despite their committed
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belief in multicultural diversity. In a 2001 survey conducted nationwide, RoseberryMcKibben, O’Hanlon, and Brice (2004) found that SLTs’ greatest area of interest in continuing education continued to be “less biased methods and materials for distinguishing language differences from language disorders,” 10 years after RoseberryMcKibben and Eicholtz (1994) conducted a similar study. Many in the field assumed that by acquiring more data on diverse child language development, broadening and improving our assessment methods and instruments, and providing communication disorders students with language diversity assessment and intervention theory and practice, our expertise and accuracy in conducting differential diagnoses would improve. However, while the first two components have been achieved, instruction of undergraduate and graduate students in language diversity does not seem to have changed significantly and practicing SLTs appear to continue to lack differential diagnosis knowledge in this area. Disproportional Representation of African Americans in Speech-Language Impairment Category African American children have traditionally been overrepresented in special education, especially in the areas of educable mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, learning disabilities and, up to 1980, in speech and/or language disorder (Chinn & Hughes, 1987). One of the identified factors in the overrepresentation of African Americans in the area of speech and language disorders is a lack of knowledge on the part of SLTs of the AAE dialect and the features that may distinguish normal from abnormal language development in AAE- speaking children.
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As of 1990, the Office of Civil Rights stopped monitoring speech and language impairment category for disproportionality by ethnicity and race because it no longer caused sufficient concern regarding placement discrimination. However, recent analysis of the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs’ (OSEP) 2004 data demonstrated overrepresentation of African American students at the national level (Robinson, 2006). Many researchers have argued that disproportionality needs to be examined at the state and local school district levels because an averaging-out effect at the national level may obscure over- and underrepresentation in individual states and districts. Currently, there is a trend toward the underrepresentation of African Americans in speech and/or language therapy in the schools. An example of this reversing trend is presented in a status report commissioned by the Indiana Department of Education Division of Special Education (Skiba, Chung, Wu, Simmons, & St. John, 2000). The authors used the z-test of proportions used by the Office of Civil Rights, and found that “significant underrepresentation of African American students was discovered for the category Communication Disordered and for regular class placement” at the school district level in the state of Indiana for the 1998-1999 school year. My own analysis of OSEP’s 1998-1999 data at the state level demonstrated underrepresentation in 21 states and overrepresentation in 8 states. Robinson (2006) also found overrepresentation of African Americans at the national level in the U.S. Department of Education’s 2004 special education data. Overrepresentation in speech and language impairment placement may be attributed to SLTs’ lack of familiarity with AAE in states with low percentages of African American students. Underrepresentation of African American students in speech
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and language impairment placement, which appears to be an growing problem, may be attributed to urban school district SLTs’ awareness of the need to distinguish language difference from language disorder without the benefit of sufficient knowledge of AAE or of differential diagnostic procedures. SLTs who view nonmainstream dialects as “incorrect” English may diagnose AAE-speakers as language impaired and recommend their placement in special education. SLTs who are aware of the danger of diagnosing AAE-speakers as language-impaired based on dialect alone may be tempted to avoid the dilemma of making a differential diagnosis without relevant training by classifying all AAE-speakers as “language different” and typically developing. Typically developing AAE-speaking children who are diagnosed as languageimpaired are clearly at risk for lowered self-esteem, the stigma of special education placement, and are often placed in restricted learning environments by pull-out therapy time. On the other hand, by saying that all AAE-speakers are speaking a dialectal variation from MAE rather probing for possible language disorders, SLTs may unwittingly be denying needed services to AAE-speakers with language disorders. The misdiagnosis of AAE speaking children resulting in over- or underrepresentation in speech and language services has a negative effect on AAE-speaking children’s academic and social success, with far reaching consequences on life outcomes (Artiles & Rueda, 2002). Language Assessment in Communicative Disorders A language assessment is comprised of the appraisal, which includes the gathering of background data as well as direct examination, and diagnosis, which is made “through the study and interpretation of this information” (Paul, 1995). The domains of
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language evaluated by SLTs include: syntax, the rules that govern the form or structure of a sentence; morphology, the internal organization of words; phonology, the specific speech sounds or phonemes and sound combinations of a language; semantics, the relationship of language form to objects, events, and with words and word combinations; and pragmatics, the knowledge of social appropriateness as it relates to form and content. However, language is also socially situated. It is generally accepted within the field of communicative disorders that “all communication – normal or disordered- must be defined, studied, or discussed only in a cultural context. Since disordered communication is defined as a deviation from the norm, that norm has to be culturally based” (Shames & Anderson, 2003). A language assessment is used to determine the child’s level of language development or impairment, to establish functional baselines and goals for intervention, and to measure changes following treatment. Language assessment can include examination of the structure and function of speech mechanisms, non-verbal cognition, and social functioning. Assessment measures include “standardized tests, developmental scales, (informal) non-standardized or criterion-referenced procedures, and behavioral observations” (Paul, 1995, p. 37). Speech-language therapists are taught to follow a general assessment protocol, which includes: the gathering of background history through parent and teacher interviews; taking a language sample of the child’s speech and language to analyze for intelligibility, grammatical structures and pragmatics; observing the child’s communicative behaviors in various settings; and administering standardized formal tests as well as informal assessment measures.
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Standardized tests are criterion- or norm-referenced. Norm-referenced tests are based on large participant samples, and the results from field testing are placed on a bell curve, which establishes a range of average performance (usually between the 25th and 75th percentiles), below average performance (at or below 24th percentile), and above average performance (76th percentile and above). Children are placed into speech and language services according to standards established by each school district, but usually placement requires scores of at least 1.5 standard deviations below the mean. While scores at or below the 16th percentile would be cause for concern, the bar for enrollment in school districts is often set at an arbitrary score, such as the 7th percentile or lower on one or more standardized tests in any one or several domains of communication. Often low scores are required on more than one formal or informal measure of communicative competence. Non-standardized or informal measures include language checklists given to the parents to document a child’s communicative behaviors, from gestures to speech, and language samples that are tape- or videorecorded, often during play or conversation.
Differential Diagnosis Practice Standards The United States Department of Education and individual state departments of education stipulate that SLI diagnosis must exclude differences due to cultural and linguistic community influences. ASHA (1983) declared in its position paper on social dialects that, “no dialectal variety of English is a disorder or a pathological form of speech or language.” Subsequently, the acquisition of the requisite knowledge regarding African American English and its linguistic rule system became “best practice” for all
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SLTs with African American clients in order to distinguish between language differences and disorders in this population. Differential diagnosis refers to the “process of distinguishing between two similar appearing conditions by discovering a significant symptom or attribute present in one condition but not the other” (Nicolisi, Harryman, & Kresheck, 1983). Differential diagnosis with regard to language disorders in culturally and linguistically diverse children involves recognizing language differences, that is, a dialect or language different from that of the evaluating SLT, as distinct from language disorders. According to an ASHA (2003, p. 3) document on American English dialects, SLT competencies in differential diagnosis of NME dialects include: 1)
recognizing all American English dialects as rule-governed linguistic systems,
2)
understanding the rules and linguistic features of American English dialect(s) represented by their clientele,
3)
being familiar with nondiscriminatory testing and dynamic assessment procedures, such as the following: a) identifying potential sources of test bias, b) administering and scoring standardized tests in alternative manners, c) using observation and nontraditional interview and language sampling techniques, and d) analyzing test results in light of existing information regarding dialect use.
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Differential diagnosis with regard to language differences is a complex topic in the United States. It requires either 1) extensive knowledge of various American dialect language systems and the ways in which non-English languages influence English as spoken by second language learners or, 2) knowledge, and competent implementation, of non-biased language evaluation methods using interpreters or language informants from the child’s language community, communicative behavior observations, and cultural sensitivity. Protocols for differentiating between dialectal variations and language disorders have been established by ASHA (2004) and various state education departments (CSHA 1994; 2003). Seymour (2004) asserts that there are three important sources of variation amongst which SLTs must differentiate: “variation due to speech and language development, variation due to speech and language dialects, and variation due to speech and language disorder” (Seymour, 2004, p. 9). Child language varies over the course of development. Children under the age of 6 often demonstrate phonological and grammatical features that vary from those of adults, and different standards are applied in the evaluation of children’s language abilities according to age. Developmental growth within a dialect has been documented in AAE speakers as well as in MAE speakers. Children under the age of 2 or 3 rarely demonstrate AAE-distinct dialect features because their speech and language is yet very basic. The need for differentiation according to speech and language dialectal variation is central to the theoretical framework of the present study. Typically developing AAE language is confounded with disordered MAE language because of SLTs’ lack of knowledge about AAE developmental language which is compounded by similarities
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between certain AAE phonological and syntactical forms and common signs of child MAE language disorder. The clinician who does not have a thorough knowledge of contrastive and noncontrastive AAE linguistic rules could easily see AAE forms as signs of language disorder, especially if she or he were relying on most of the MAE-based language competence tests commonly used. Seymour (2004) proposed that to evaluate NME speakers, the SLT must first identify the dialect of the speaker and then conduct an assessment using instruments and methods that are not biased against that dialect. Pearson (2004) puts this succinctly by saying that, “the goal for a dialect-sensitive language assessment is to help clinicians identify the signs of language disorder in children without penalizing them for dialect features or typical linguistic development” (p. 101).
Unbiased and Effective Language Assessment Methods for AAE Speakers Given the state of child language development assessment in 1983, at the time of the ASHA position paper, unbiased and effective language assessment tools were sorely needed. The ideal assessment instrument for African American children would be one that was normed on African American children, especially those who speak AAE. Since there were no such tests, some of the first suggestions were to 1)
create local African American norms for existing standardized tests;
2)
create informal tests to assess language competence tests;
3)
create alternative rubrics for NME dialects;
4)
use language sampling analysis; and finally,
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5)
create an assessment instrument normed on AAE speakers.
One of the first methods proposed for making standardized tests less biased was the creation of local norms for individual groups of NME speaking children (VaughnCooke, 1986). The problem with this method was that practicing SLTs rarely have time to collect research data and create norms, and in actuality, besides norming bias, there were other validity issues with such tests, such as cultural bias in the selection of topics and pictures. However, alternative rubrics for NME dialects were included in a number of MAE-standardized assessments, including one of the most commonly used tests, the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – 4th Ed. (CELF-4) (Semel et al., 2004). The CELF-4 has alternative rubrics for scoring some of its syntactical subtests for AAEspeakers, Appalachian dialect speakers, and speakers of Spanish-influenced English. Language sample analysis was another approach to an unbiased testing schema, but Stockman (1996) pointed out that language sample analysis of AAE speakers is not a solution for SLTs who do not have a broad understanding of the dynamics of AAE. And while the idea of a test standardized on AAE speakers was and is very attractive, the testing principles for NME speakers had not yet been established in 1983, nor was there much research on child NME development, so an NME-standardized test was years away. The most promising efforts at nondiscriminatory testing came from the development of alternative assessments that did not rely on the contrastive surface forms of AAE and MAE grammar and phonology. Alternative assessments are nonstandardized tests in which a student creates a response rather than choosing a response from a provided list of multiple-choice answers. Common alternative tests are criterion-
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referenced tests, therapist or teacher created tests, interviews with students and their parents, and detailed documentation of students’ achievements. In evaluating communicative disorders, standard testing batteries already include parent interviews and these are still good practice with parents of NME speakers. Bleile and Wallach (1992) recommended that SLTs consider the speech judgments of community members in their clinical evaluations of African American children. They identified non-dialect related patterns of speech errors that were considered to indicate some African American children’s “trouble with speaking” according to members of the children’s own community — teachers at a local Head Start program. A variation of this “speech community judges” method is an interview in which the parent is asked to compare the language development of the child being assessed to that of older siblings at the same age, and/or to compare it to that of other age peers in the family such as cousins, or in the community at large. Wyatt (1995) created a peer version of such information gathering. She observed linguistic and pragmatic exchanges among the targeted child and their AAE-speaking peers during play to evaluate how they responded to a peer suspected of using speech and language differently. She proposed that this technique be implemented to gather information on AAE-speakers’ risk for disorder. This method proved very effective in that the peers found various aspects of the child’s language to be questionable, including his pragmatics and difficulty in using key AAE language styles. Researchers have pursued the development and use of alternative testing that is not dependent on the child’s knowledge of MAE. Some testing publishers have provided alternative rubrics for scoring individual subtests of standardized language tests (CELF,
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2004, Semel et al.). Other alternative assessments devised to provide more unbiased and effective evaluations of NME and bilingual speakers include the parent-child comparative analysis (Terrell, Arensberg, & Rosa, 1992), the minimal core competency method (Stockman, 1992), language sampling analysis (Stockman, 1996), processing-dependent (Pena, Iglesias, & Lidz, 2001; Campbell, Dollaghan, Needleman, & Janosky, 1997; Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998), noncontrastive analysis (Seymour, Bland-Stewart, & Green, 1998). Other researchers have assembled entire alternative assessment batteries for AAE children (Craig & Washington, 2000). These assessment techniques are discussed in greater detail below. Terrell, Arensberg, and Rosa (1992) examined the administration of an identical battery of tests to a child and parent who both spoke a dialect of English unfamiliar to the examiners. The child’s performance was interpreted in relation to that of her father’s. This method has its limitations. Due to the lack of familiarity with the norms for the dialect in question, it would be difficult to establish whether the parent to whom the child is being compared did not himself have speech or language delays. Minimal core competency (MCC) is a criterion-referenced language screening protocol developed by Stockman (1992) that is expected to demonstrate the minimum common core knowledge of language expected of a child at any given age. This protocol screens for minimal core competencies in the areas of phonology, pragmatics, semantics and morphosyntax. The MCC operates on the principle that typically developing children “in the same age range share a common core of linguistic features despite their individual differences” and “the absence of one or more of these features correlates highly with
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language delay” (Stockman, 1996, p. 359). Stockman herself has used the minimal core competency in language sampling and analysis. The use of informal assessment methods brings with it the problem of the SLT’s lack of knowledge of the dialect’s contrastive and non-contrastive features needed in order to analyze the data collected (Vaughn-Cooke, 1986). In the case of language sampling and analysis, language sampling is inherently less biased in its application because it can legitimize the “ordinary talk” of the community and it is based on “natural” speech events rather than elicited and standardized responses (Stockman, 1996). On the other hand, it is difficult to manage the contextual variation of language samples and children may perform differently in school language samples than in home language samples. However, the main obstacle to effectively using language sampling as a nondiscriminatory assessment procedure is the fact that many clinicians have inadequate information on NME development and language features which is required in order to analyze the data they collect on NME-speaking children. Laing and Kamhi (2003) examined the discriminatory accuracy of processingdependent measures, knowledge-dependent measures, and dynamic assessments as culturally bias-free methods of language assessment. Their findings found that culturally and linguistically diverse children scored significantly lower on the knowledgedependent measure (MAE-based language ability test) than on the processing-dependent measures (tasks of nonword, working memory, and following directions: The Revised Token Test). Their findings suggest that processing dependent measures and/or dynamic assessment methods are effective alternative assessment measures of language impairment in NME-speaking children.
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Dynamic assessment uses a “test-teach-retest format and a focus on the learning process” (Pena, Iglesias, & Lidz, p. 139). Pena, et al., (2001) examined the word-learning performance of preschoolers with typical and low-language ability from CLD backgrounds by teaching them mediating strategies. This method was found to be more effectively at differentiating between CLD typically developing and language-disordered children than standardized word labeling tests. Campbell, Dollaghan, Needleman, and Janosky (1997) also hold that processingdependent measures are inherently less biased than knowledge-dependent measures. Their nonword repetition task was designed to be equally familiar to all children, regardless of cultural or linguistic background. Their study demonstrated that language processing limitations was more effective in differentiating children with language disorders more from their typically developing peers than were standardized normreferenced tests. Seymour and Seymour (1977) proposed that one way to solve the difference/disorder dilemma was to completely avoid contrastive features between AAE and MAE. Their research utilized phonotactic stimulus items that were not dialect-biased, specifically those without final consonants or final consonant clusters. The researchers found that “[c]onsonant clusters of varying level of phonological difficulty [were] shown to discriminate between typically developing and phonologically impaired children of different dialect groups” (Seymour, 2004). Seymour, Bland-Stewart, and Green (1998) extended the use of noncontrastive features in phonology to semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. They found that noncontrastive, or shared, features between AAE and MAE were more revealing of language impairment than contrastive features. These findings were
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later used to develop the AAE-normed Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (2004), discussed below. Craig and Washington (2000) published an assessment battery protocol for African American children. This battery includes informal measures of language sample analyses and language comprehension tasks. It requires that the SLT have core competency in detailed features of African American English and, ideally, a knowledge of developmental norms for AAE. Their findings demonstrated the battery’s excellent sensitivity to language impairment in AAE speaking children, and provides a list of AAE features for use in the language sampling analysis. Unfortunately, very few SLTs meet the competency criteria for the use of this assessment battery. While some alternative assessment methods cited in the research such as the nonword repetition task are familiar to and easily used by SLTs, others such as the minimal core competence, are not readily available for general use, or require special training such as dynamic assessment. Many of the proposed alternative assessments for NME speakers, require a depth of knowledge not easily achieved beyond university training and/or require time-consuming processes of analysis, such as Craig and Washington’s assessment battery protocol or any assessment method that includes language sampling of the NME population. SLTs are most highly trained on, and familiar with, standardized tests. In 2003, Seymour, Roeper, and deVilliers published two alternative assessment tools based on developmental data on African American children who were typically developing and language-impaired, the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation – Screening Test (DELV-ST, 2003a) and the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language
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Evaluation – Criterion-Referenced (DELV-CR, 2003b).The DELV-ST (Seymour et al., 2003) utilizes contrastive features between AAE and MAE to determine whether a child speaks MAE or a variation from MAE, and non-contrastive AAE and MAE features to determine whether a speaker of either dialect is at risk for language disorder. It does not effectively determine whether a child is language-impaired or not. A norm-referenced version of the DELV (DELV-NR) (Seymour et al., 2005) was originally piloted on more than 500 African American and White children between the ages of 4 and 6 who were either AAE or MAE speakers. A subsequent tryout sample was based on 465 African American children across the United States. The standardization sample included 1800 children of all ethnicities aged 4 to 10. The DELV-NR evaluates child language development status in the areas of semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and phonology. It uses a variety of assessment techniques recommended for NME-speaker assessment, including non-contrastive syntactical, semantic, and phonological structures, a narrative elicitation task, and the use of question forms to test the child’s ability to take the listener’s perspective. These tests are a breakthrough long awaited in communicative disorder research as they represent the first nondiscriminatory, norm-referenced standardized tests for NME and MAE speaking children alike. V.
Current Practice It is clear that the university communicative disorders programs have not, for the
most part, provided an in-depth knowledge base in the area of multicultural assessment in general or in African American English assessment in particular. In a national survey of ASHA-accredited communicative disorders programs, Stockman, Boult and Robinson (2003) found a high degree of variability in multicultural issues course content and
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methods. Stockman, Boult and Robinson (2004) attributed the inconsistent level of knowledge transmission on multicultural issues in assessment and treatment to three major factors. The first is the fact that most “[f]aculty … completed their professional education before this curricular content was addressed.” The second is that it is only in the last decade that the knowledge base regarding child AAE has been more firmly established. Finally, but not least in importance, is the fact that only in 1994 was there established a curricular multicultural issues requirement for ASHA-accredited communicative disorders program, eleven years after ASHA’s position on social dialects was established. Stockman et al. found that, while faculty agreed on the importance of including academic and clinical instruction in multicultural issues in their curricula, they needed better guidelines regarding content and access to instructional resources. Bilingualism is more prevalent and possibly more understood than dialectal variation, however studies on multicultural assessment methods for bilinguals (Roseberry, Kritikos) are probably no more well-used. Factors Affecting Multicultural Assessment Practice There are four main obstacles to the provision of nonbiased assessment to children who speak a different language or dialect from that of the SLT conducting the assessment. The first is a lack of training at the university level in nonbiased assessment of English Language Learners (ELL) and of NME speakers. The second is the difficulty in accessing, interpreting, and implementing the research findings on ELL and NME speaker language development patterns and norms. SLT have very time-constrained schedules, sometimes traveling between schools to provide services, and having an overload of Individualized Education Plan testing paperwork and meetings. They rarely
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have time to research special interests not covered in their university programs and may not have sufficient time to collect and analyze language sample data. For this and other reasons, SLTs often rely heavily on standardized testing instruments to reach relatively quick decisions on the language development status of the children they are called on to evaluate. The California Speech-Language and Hearing Association published a position paper on the impact of caseload size in the public schools on service (CSHA, 1995). This document delineated a multitude of factors that constrain service delivery including economic constraints, budget cuts, personnel shortages, and downsizing of government programs. California school SLTs were considered to have the highest caseloads nationwide (ASHA Omnibus Survey, 1992, p. 61) as well as increasingly more complex service delivery issues including those of providing services to culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Most states have caseload guidelines, ranging from at least 24 clients to no upper limit. However, SLTs report excessive caseloads even from those states with caseload guidelines. While the CSHA position paper regarding service delivery in the public schools (CSHA, 2004) established 40 as the upper limit for preschool caseloads, for example, and a maximum average of 55 per school district, a greater caseload is allowed for “special circumstances.” Thus, it is clear that many SLTs in California can have excessive caseloads, as well as complex population histories, and consequently, increased time pressure for conducting assessments. The following section reviews studies on the actual practices in the assessment of ELL and NME speaking children. Studies of Current School Practice
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There are a number of studies that have focused on the service delivery of school SLTs. Some of the most relevant refer to satisfaction with work conditions and assessment instruments. Huang, Hopkins, and Nippold (1997) surveyed 216 clinicians across several work settings in the state of Oregon on their satisfaction with numerous factors associated with testing. Those factors included: time available for test administration and analysis, funding available for test purchase, and the psychometric properties of the standardized tests themselves. School SLTs were significantly less satisfied with standardized tests than clinicians in clinic or hospital settings. Major factors of dissatisfaction were caseloads over 40, time availability, and lack of appropriate material for multicultural testing. The authors concluded that standardized testing should be combined with descriptive language assessment for more valid results. However, with time constraints as a major concern, the use of informal language assessment practices may not be practical for school SLTs with large caseloads. A survey of 239 school SLTs from nine Midwestern states (Hux, Morris-Friehe, & Sanger, 1993) revealed that practitioners routinely used language sample analyses. However, language sampling was most often restricted to young, moderate to severely impaired children from cultures similar to those of the clinicians. The authors raised concerns about the lack of use of language sampling for appropriate and complete assessment of older children and of culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Several studies specifically address service delivery to children from non-English speaking backgrounds. Roseberry-McKibbin and Eicholtz (1992) conducted a national survey of public school SLTs to children with limited English proficiency (LEP). The researchers found that 90% of the 1,145 respondents did not speak the language of their
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clients fluently enough to provide services in that language and that 76% of the respondents had no previous coursework or classes on assessment and treatment of LEP children. These school clinicians were eager to learn about assessment and treatment procedures to serve their LEP populations. Most were interested in school in-services but they were also interested in taking coursework provided by universities. A follow-up national survey asked 1,736 public school clinicians about their service delivery to English Language Learners (Roseberry-McKibbin, O’Hanlon, & Brice, 2004). While public school clinicians had even higher ELL caseloads than those who took the previous survey ten years prior, only 12% of clinicians said they spoke the language of their clients fluently enough to provide services in that language. The problems affecting service delivery were, in order of importance: not speaking the language of the client, lack of less biased assessment instruments, and lack of trained professionals who speak the students’ languages. One area of improvement was that of training or coursework taken in the area of service delivery to ELL students – previously only 24% of the clinicians indicated they had had coursework regarding serving ELL students, while 63% of the clinicians on the current survey indicated they had taken university coursework, more than doubling the previous number of SLPs trained to work with the ELL population. Speech and language service delivery to ELL students is relevant to the topic of NME student services because the difficulties facing SLTs with both populations are similar, including the fact that few SLTs are trained to provide services in a second language or dialect, few nondiscriminatory assessment materials for ELL and NME students are readily accessible to SLTs, and very few SLTs have received specific
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theoretical and practical instruction in working with culturally and linguistically diverse populations. While it can be argued that a language foreign to an SLT is a greater barrier to accurate assessment of the ELL student than is a NME dialect, an NME dialect often evokes an negative evaluation from the average American to the extent that he or she has prescriptivist notions about standard language. The change in the number of universities providing courses on English language learners indicates that university programs are responding to the need for more bilingual assessment and treatment instruction, both in inclusion models and separate courses devoted to that topic. There is, unfortunately, no indication of a similar increase in university coursework being provided in the area of non-mainstream American English dialects. Kohnert, Kennedy, Glaze, Kan & Carney (2003) sent a web-based survey to 500 SLTs listed as practicing in Minnesota to examine multicultural diversity issues in the SLTs’ service delivery. Minnesota has seen a significant increase in the cultural and linguistic diversity of its client population in recent years and has a majority white speech-language pathologist population. The survey included questions regarding understanding the SLT’s personal and professional biases, cultural competence regarding client’s backgrounds, deep and broad understanding of the theoretical and empirical literature that guides the profession, ability to speak the language of the client and/or to collaborate effectively with appropriate cultural and linguistic interpreters, and the application of research methods to clinical practice. The 104 respondents cited a need for developmental norm data for diverse populations. The researchers concluded that the most important area of development in
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multicultural assessment must be the core knowledge and skills provided at the graduate level of university training programs. The authors suggested that the next step in pursuing such development would be to “quantify attainment of these core competencies [to provide the] foundation for continued clinical skill development with culturally and linguistically diverse populations.” Finally, surveys regarding 811 SLTs’ beliefs about their competency to assess the language of bilingual/bicultural clients were conducted across 5 states and 6 regions of the United States, chosen for the highest proportion of individuals from non-English speaking backgrounds. Respondents’ answers were correlated with linguistic matches between clinicians and their clients, demographic data, beliefs with respect to personal and general efficacy, and influence of bilingual input on referral decision-making. Speech-language therapists reported low personal efficacy in bilingual assessment as well as the general field of communicative disorders’ efficacy in bilingual assessment. The author concludes that the study of SLTs’ belief systems about language proficiency should guide further research and speech-language pathologist preparation for the language assessment of bilingual children. These studies indicate that instruction and training in assessment practices for use with bilingual children are far more common than similar instruction regarding children who speak a dialectal variation of American English in the field of communicative disorders. As stated in the summary of the survey by Stockman, Boult, and Robinson (2004), communicative disorders program faculty received their degrees prior to the era in which the profession began to address cultural and linguistic diversity. Once into their teaching careers, faculty often found it difficult to access information on cultural and
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linguistic diversity, and most culled information found on the Internet to address this gap in their experience. Most likely as a result of faculty’s scarce multicultural experience and knowledge, many communicative disorders programs do not provide specific and indepth coursework specifically pertaining to multicultural issues in general, nor, presumably, of dialectal variations. The problem of low transmission of specific and pragmatic practices for assessing children who speak a different dialect than that of the clinician is compounded by other realities of working in the schools. School clinicians have high caseloads, little time available for self-initiated research into diversity topics, and are less likely to spend time on in-depth dialectal studies through continuing education. The scarce availability of dialectal variation coursework on the Internet, in seminars, and workshops or in school in-services further limits the attainment of core knowledge and skills in this area. If SLTs do not receive in-depth training at the university, they are left to their own devices to acquire this knowledge, usually in the limited time available outside of practice in the field. Therapists may acquire knowledge in workshops at conferences, inservices at work, and through independent study. It is preferable that the speech-language pathologist have had in-depth coursework in multicultural issues (Stockman, Boult, & Kennedy, 2004), as well as clinical practice where they can be monitored and mentored through the process of alternative assessment methods not often the focus of more general assessment courses. However, most ASHAaccredited communicative disorders program have not provided its graduate students with such specifically focused instruction (Stockman et al., 2003). In addition to cultural competence, SLTs should have extensive knowledge of sociolinguistic and cultural
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influences on the AAE speaker’s language patterns, and knowledge of the features and developmental characteristics of the dialect spoken by the client (ASHA, 2004). Finally, SLTs need to know which assessment methods and instruments are appropriate for AAEspeakers (ASHA, 2004; CSHA, 2004). In an ideal world, the clinician assessing AAE speakers would have native or near-native proficiency of AAE. However 86% of SLTs are White and it is safe to say that the majority of them do not speak AAE. ASHA standards require that all SLTs must be knowledgeable of standard assessment techniques, which include gathering a developmental history, interviews with long-term caregivers and teachers, use of informal assessments such as language sample analysis, observations in family, play or classroom settings, and the use of standardized and non-standardized assessment methods. Beyond these assessment procedures, it is important that the clinician be knowledgeable about informants in the African American community who can make accurate grammaticality judgments and sociolinguistic judgments related to the African American speech community. VI.
Listener Perception and Language Attitude Studies Listener perception studies look at the saliency and frequency of certain speech
features and how these aspects of dialect affect the listeners’ judgment. Dialect variation perception studies in communicative disorders have focused most often on the study of the presence or absence of dialectal features in AAE and how to discriminate between dialectal features and disorders in child AAE (Craig, Thompson, Washington & Potter, 2003; Wyatt, 1996; Stockman, 1996) rather than on attitudes. Listener judgment studies take listener perception and apply a social context to their findings. The following is a
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look at how communicative disorders research has examined listener perception and listener judgment. Listener Perception Studies Studies of listener perception in socially-oriented disciplines tend to focus on the connection between attitude and listener perceptions (Garrett, Coupland, & Williams, 2003; Lambert, 1969). However, listener perception studies in communicative disorders have been primarily concerned with the physical aspects of speech production and perception, that is, the physiology, acoustics, and perception of speech. These studies look at frequency and formants, the effect of rates of speech on listener perception and intelligibility, the effects of voice disorders on listener perception, how the speech of people who are hearing impaired is perceived by others, or how people who have had cochlear implants perceive speech sounds. That is to say, communicative disorders listener perception studies tend to be speech science-oriented and focused on the individual. Very few listener perception studies in communicative disorders have examined American dialects or the perception of speech of non-native English speakers. A 1994 study examined how the race of the speaker could be identified by acoustic cues in the vocal signals of African American and White men and found that “expert and naïve listeners could determine the race of the speaker with 60% accuracy just from one-second acoustic samples extracted from the middle of sustained /a/ vowels (Walton & Orlikoff, 1994). In fact, many cross-disciplinary studies in listener perception studies have found that listeners can determine many speaker variables such as age, sex, and social class with surprising accuracy based on relatively short audio-recorded samples.
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A study by Moran (1993) looked at SLT listener perception of “final consonant deletion” of AAE-speaking children and found that typically trained SLTs tended to overlook how the perceived “deletions” were accompanied by vowel lengthening. SLTs trained in narrow transcription, however, more often correctly noted that the children were making substitutions rather than deleting the consonants. These findings have implications for SLT judgment of phonological patterns in AAE speech. SLTs who are not highly trained in phonetic perception and transcription appear to be likely to judge NME speaker speech as delayed or disordered speech. Baran and Seymour (1976) found that perceptual errors while listening to minimal word pairs spoken by AAE speakers were much greater for White children than for African American children. The African American children had less errors discriminating between minimal word pairs spoken by themselves, other African American children, or by White children, than the White children did. In sociolinguistic and sociological studies, it has been found that people in subordinated positions are more attuned to the characteristics and cultural differences of dominant groups than vice-versa. While this study looked at differences in perception of MAE and AAE speaking children rather than SLTs, it has implications for the effect of social status on listener perception ability. More recently, listener perception studies have focused on differentiation between NME dialects as well as how SLTs perceive AAE phonological features. These dialect perception studies are relevant to the listener perception of dialectal variation in SLTs, as is the study of SLT attitudes towards NME dialects, since their perceptions of, and attitudes toward, dialectal variation can, and most likely do, have a direct effect on the placement of NME-speakers into speech-language services.
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In Oetting and MacDonald’s (2002) study, three White doctoral linguistics students judged speech samples of Southern White English (SWE) and Southern African American English (SAAE) to determine the most efficient of three methods for coding dialectal variations: type-based, token-based, and listener judgment. The doctoral students evaluated the speech of NME-speaking children who had varying levels of language competence, from typically developing language to specific language impairment. The token-based method was found to be more accurate in classifying dialect rate or density. All of the methods were found to be moderately to highly correlated with each other. In a second listener perception study (Oetting & Garrity, 2006) it was found that phonology played a major role in the identification of different nonmainstream dialects. The researchers found that using Southern African American English morphosyntactic patterns to determine the language competence of Southern White English (SWE) speakers tended to classify SWE speakers with specific language impairment as having typically developing language. On the other hand, using SWE morphosyntactic patterns to judge the language competence of SAAE speakers tended to classify typically developing SAAE speakers as having specific language impairment. Also significant for the present study, “only an 82% accuracy rate was found for discriminating SAAE speakers with specific language impairment (p. 219)” from those developing typically. The authors cite Plante and Vance (1994) to classify diagnostic accuracy rates in the 80% range to be only “fair,” while accuracy rates in the 90% range are considered “good.” These findings speak to the perils of using one set of dialect patterns to judge the
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language competence of a speaker of a different dialect. It also provides an accuracy rate in differential diagnosis that can be compared to the data in the present study. Robinson (2006) conducted a study on SLTs listener perceptions of AAE detectability and comprehensibility. The SLTs were unfamiliar with AAE. Robinson’s study focused on phonological features since they have been found to be the most identifiable features of dialectal patterns. He found that the number of dialect features included in a sentence increased dialect detectability, while the types of features in a sentence affected comprehensibility more than dialect detectability. Robinson also found that both comprehensibility ratings were inversely correlated with a greater number of AAE features. Certain features had greater perceptual salience, such as deletion of /k/ and /t/ and the substitution of t/th. Robinson’s findings imply that use of AAE features associated with AAE such as f/th or features that are perceptually salient such as /k/ deletion will be considered less comprehensible to the general population (of MAE speakers) and more detectable as AAE. Attitude Studies Lambert (1969) was the first researcher in the field of social psychology to examine attitudes toward dialect speakers. Assuming that attitudes are usually not directly observable, Lambert devised an indirect method of measurement of attitude called the “matched guise” technique, in which the same readers read a passage using different dialectal patterns, so that the only independent variable between the paired readings was the dialect used. Listeners were then asked to rate recordings of people who they perceive to be different readers, using what is called an attitude rating scale, often a
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“semantic differential scale” of personality characteristics, with bipolar qualifiers such as “friendly-unfriendly,” “intelligent-unintelligent,” and “dependable-undependable.” Garrett, Coupland, and Williams (2003) conducted two studies in which they collected qualitative and quantitative responses in dialect communities in Wales. In the first study, they collected teachers’ responses to a questionnaire survey on language attitudes, using both perceptual dialectology “map-filling and labeling” tasks and sets of “semantic-differential attitude-ranking scales” (Garrett, Coupland, & Williams, 2003, p. 82). In the second study, they collected tape-recorded narratives of 15-year old students telling stories in their regional dialects about events that had happened to them. The narrative recordings were presented to both teachers and students, who filled out narrative questionnaires with the following tasks: one, asking the respondents to identify the dialect of each storyteller, and two, asking the respondents to write down their immediate impressions of each of the speakers. The authors used the qualitative data to “provide deeper insights into the processes of identity-building amongst the teenagers, and a richer evaluative picture of the dialect communities and narrative performances than scales alone can access” (p. 83). The students and teachers were largely in agreement on their ratings of “how Welsh” each narrative was, demonstrating good precision with regard to “dialectal constitution” of the narratives. The teachers’ affiliations to Received Pronunciation (RP) of British English was more pronounced than the students’ positions, indicating some “stereotyped association of low competence or achievement with low-status dialects of Welsh English” (Garrett, Coupland, & Williams, 2003, p. 155) . Teachers rated those students who used more RP as being “better at school” than those who used less.
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Attitudes varied depending on the semantic-differential used, social attractiveness or good at school. The second, narrative-based study demonstrated that evaluative judgment of narrative discourse is multidimensional. The authors found that “only some of [the judgment] values were carried by dialect” and that judgments were based on “a complex interplay between dialect and discourse performance” (p. 175). They also found that teachers’ roles as gatekeepers and their “formal and informal judgements” about teenagers include “the social evaluation of linguistic style, even to the point where this can influence formal school-assessment outcomes” (p. 176). In the field of communicative disorders, only a few studies have looked at language attitudes linking dialect speech perception and listener judgment. In 1970, Williams conducted a language attitude study of grade school teachers’ evaluations of speech samples of African American and White children, using semantic differentials such as “confidence-eagerness” and “ethnicity-nonstandard.” He found that measured characteristics of the speech samples corresponded to teachers’ prior judgments of the children’s social status. When White teachers rated a child as having high social status, the teachers’ displayed a greater tendency to identify that child as White, even if he was African American. Only one study specifically examined the attitudes and beliefs of speech language therapists about AAE speaking children. Bountress (1980) investigated the attitudes of SLTs towards treatment goal-setting for AAE speakers as well as the SLTs’ level of university training in social dialects. The researcher received responses from 100 SLTs in six urban public school systems in Southwestern Virginia. The questionnaire asked the SLTs whether AAE speakers should learn to be SAE/AAE bidialectal speakers, eliminate
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the use of AAE, or remain monodialectal speakers of AAE. The vast majority (97%) of the clinicians selected the goal of bidialectalism for AAE speakers, which Bountress interpreted as a positive attitude toward AAE, although those same SLTs felt they had not been adequately trained to carry out bidialectal instruction with AAE speakers. VII.
Summary While there have been many studies on dialect perception and dialect attitudes in
the fields of social psychology, sociolinguistics and perceptual dialectology, very few studies have been conducted on dialect perception and attitude of school SLTs. In general, communicative disorders studies in the areas of listener perception and attitudes are focused on the client rather than on the speech-language practitioner, Recent listener perception studies in communicative disorders have made inroads in identifying efficient and effective methods of identifying NME dialects (Craig, Washington & Potter, 2003; Oetting & MacDonald, 2002) and one study (Robinson, 2006) looked at SLTs’ perceptions regarding AAE and MAE phonological feature intelligibility and comprehensibility. Since SLT competency in knowledge of AAE features and awareness of SLTs’ own language beliefs about AAE are of the utmost importance for the differential language diagnosis of AAE speakers, more studies need to focus specifically on SLT’s perceptions of AAE features and their attitudes towards AAE use. The next chapter will address the research design of the present study and the methods used to address the present study’s research questions regarding SLT listener perception and language attitudes.
Chapter 3: Methods
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I.
Introduction This chapter describes the research design used in this study and the rationale for
that research design. The sampling methods, the chosen population, and the data collection procedures and instruments are also reviewed in detail. The chapter is divided into two major sections. The first addresses methods used with the speech-language therapists (SLTs). The SLT subject section includes a discussion of the selection of the school district and of individual SLTs, including the development of the survey questionnaire and listener judgment rating scales, their designs, and the SLT interview protocol. The child subject section concerns the methods used in the design and production of the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument (AANEI), including the selection and evaluation of child participants, the interview of their parents or guardians, and the videotaping of the narrative samples. Given that the purpose of the study was to explore the knowledge base and attitudes of school SLTs towards the speech and language of African American children, the main methodological concerns were 1) finding a sample of SLTs who fit criteria of nationality, years of experience and, exposure to AAE speakers and 2) finding a sample of African American children of varying language competence who spoke varying degrees of Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American English (AAE) and who could provide intelligible narrative language samples. Research Design and Rationale This study generally follows an exploratory/participatory qualitative research model, in that it uses questionnaires and interviews to collect data from its participants. However, the data collected is analyzed with a variety of qualitative and quantitative
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methods, and therefore follows a mixed model framework. Patton (1990) describes mixed methods through triangulation as the preferred method of conducting research, based on the constructivist perspective that no one source of data can ever describe phenomena absolutely. Triangulation is the practice of using a combination of methods and/or data sources to address this issue. Tashakkori and Teddlie (1998) take this concept even farther by suggesting that the best research design is one that crosses the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative to create a ”mixed model studies” approach that takes best advantage of the strengths of each design while mitigating their weaknesses. In this research, the “multiple applications” form of the mixed model studies is used. This type of inquiry is predominantly qualitative and uses quantitative methods that help define qualitative responses. The questions that led to this study came directly from grounded observations and facts about the poor quality and quantity of exposure and knowledge of SLTs, on the subject of African American English, resulting from university training and continued education after graduation from professional degree programs. As discussed in my literature review, it is the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, labeled here as the mixed model study approach, that has most informed the methods chosen for this research.
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II.
Speech-Language Therapist Participants
Population and Sample School District An urban school district in Northern California, specifically located in the San Francisco Bay Area, was chosen as the locus of the study because African American students are most highly concentrated in urban public schools and that is where they are most likely to be impacted by SLTs’ diagnostic decision-making processes. The SLTs were all chosen from within this district. The total district population in 2005 was approximately 30,000 students. Their ethnic distribution included: 40.3% Latino, 26.3% African American, 18.1% Asian, 12% White (not Hispanic) and 0.4% American Indian or Alaska Native. This was a diverse urban school population that presented a cultural and linguistic challenge to the district SLTs. Speech-Language Therapists Population Sample The population sample included all the SLTs working in the above-described urban school district in the San Francisco Bay Area. The main participants in this study were SLTs working with preschool, elementary, or secondary school students. Sampling Procedures The sampling procedures used were a combination of convenience and purposive sampling. There were two phases of selection based on the instrument being used. The first phase targeted the entire population of school district speech therapists, all of whom were invited to complete a survey questionnaire during two mandatory district-wide meetings and one in-service seminar during the Fall 2005 semester. The second phase
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targeted a subsection of those therapists, those who had completed the questionnaires, who were invited to participate in an extended interview based on specific therapist criteria including having been raised in American culture, having a caseload of African American children in the last school year, and having at least two years of professional experience. All of the therapists who met the criteria were asked to participate in an interview to further explore the issue of language diversity in their assessment practice. The ten therapists who agreed to be interviewed became the participants of this study. Response Rate Most of the 52 survey questionnaires were distributed to all of the therapists present during one of two mandatory department meetings and one in-service seminar. The remaining questionnaires were placed in SLTs’ personal mailboxes between September and November 2005. Twenty-two therapists returned completed questionnaires by November 2005. Of those 22 questionnaire respondents, 8 were not native American citizens or did not speak English as a first language one of the inclusion criteria. Fourteen of the SLTs who met all three of the criteria were invited to be interviewed, and 10 accepted. Characteristics of the Sample Most of the therapists were White females. Half of the therapists had less than or equal to 20 years of experience and half had more than twenty years of experience. The number of African American children on the therapists’ caseload varied widely, from between 1-5 and 21-30 children. (See Table 1.)
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Table 1: Characteristics of SLTs Speech-Language Years since Graduation Therapists 01 3 04 3 06 3 10 6 02 11 05 23 08 25 07 30 03 34 09 35 III.
Average African American Caseload 11-20 1-5 6-10 1-5 6-10 21-30 11-20 21-30 1-5 11-20
Instrumentation: SLT Data Collection The instruments used to collect data from the SLTs included a survey
questionnaire (Appendix A), a SLT interview protocol (Appendix B), the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument, and two Listener Judgment Rating Scales (Appendices C and D). Survey Questionnaire Background/Rationale for Development of the Questionnaire The purpose of the survey was to: 1)
assess SLT satisfaction with their university-level preparation for working with African American English-speaking children;
2)
gather information on the caseload diversity among SLTs within the school district;
3)
look at variables that might correlate with the therapists’ clinical assessment of African American English-speaking children, such as years since graduation and number of African American children on their caseloads; and
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4)
select SLTs for the interview phase of the research. From the questionnaire results, I could conduct both quantitative analysis, correlating variables to accuracy on the rating scales, and qualitative analysis of the evaluative comments written on the questionnaire.
The questions that informed my choice of items in the questionnaire where: 5)
Are SLTs who graduated in the last 15 years more knowledgeable about appropriate assessment practices to use with non-Mainstream American English speakers than those who graduated more than 15 years ago?
6)
Does increased exposure to AAE-speakers on SLTs’ caseloads improve their knowledge of AAE phonological and grammatical features?
7)
Does increased exposure to AAE-speakers on SLTs’ caseloads increase the number of times they seek out new information on nonstandard English?
8)
Do misinformed notions of AAE phonological and grammatical features have a negative effect on accurate diagnosis of AAE speakers with and without language disorders?
9)
Do negative attitudes towards AAE as a nonstandard English have a negative effect on accurate diagnosis of AAE-speakers?
These questions most closely aligned with the quantitative variables that were intended to be analyzed in the children’s narrative speech. The analysis focused on the children’s use of different types of phonological and grammatical markers of AAE and the degree to which they use these features (dialect density) as well as the children’s actual language competence or disorder as measured with the Diagnostic Evaluation of
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Language Variation (DELV-NR; Seymour, Roeper & deVilliers, 2005), an unbiased standardized instrument normed primarily on African American children. Development and Pilot-Testing of the Questionnaire This survey questionnaire was originally designed based on the researcher’s perception that SLTs lacked full knowledge of American dialectal variations and of how to conduct unbiased assessment methods, and a concern that this status was not improving significantly over time. The original questions focused on when SLTs graduated from their university training programs and what they considered to be appropriate methods of assessment for culturally and linguistically diverse children. The survey was significantly modified twice as it was pilot-tested. The original survey only addressed the methods that SLTs were using to assess African American students, with the goal of determining whether the therapists were using “best practices” for multicultural assessment. I distributed this first twenty-page questionnaire to a group of 15 SLTs selected at a meeting of a local chapter of a speechlanguage pathology organization because they were all African American SLTs who had experience with African American clients and because they were familiar with the issues of multicultural assessment. However, there was poor response to the survey and I discovered that the questionnaire was too long and the questions were poorly designed. Furthermore, I had provided no incentive for busy therapists to take the time to reflect on their practices and complete the questionnaire. I subsequently researched survey design and surveys conducted by other researchers in the speech-language pathology field. The next questionnaire’s content was influenced by a number of survey questionnaires administered to SLTs. Kritikos (2003)
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examined the sense of competence on the part of bilingual and monolingual SLTs in conducting assessments with English language learners and how this correlated with the method and timing of their cultural and language training. The Kohnert, Glaze, Kan, & Carney (2003) survey looked at the training, clinical caseloads, professional experiences with diversity, and the opinions on multicultural training needs of Minnesota school SLTs. Roseberry-McKibbin and Eicholtz (1994) conducted a national survey that examined clinical services being provided to “limited English proficient” (LEP) children and the preparation of SLTs for working with the LEP population. Finally, Dillman’s 2000 text on the “tailored design method” of creating and administering survey questionnaires influenced the wording, number, and ordering of questionnaire items, as well as provided valuable data on how to increase response rates. The second questionnaire was pilot-tested with four certified SLTs with at least 5 years of experience at a local non-profit language clinic where the researcher works. All of the SLTs graduated with a master’s degree and one had a clinical rehabilitative credential. Their feedback allowed for the editing of some questions, the cutting of some altogether, the introduction of new questions, and an overall improvement on the construction of the questionnaire. One of the therapists, who is bilingual and bicultural, urged the consideration of the influence that learning another language at home and in their home community may have had on the therapist, which compelled the addition of questions about other languages and dialects the therapists had been exposed to in their homes and growing up in their communities, at school, and abroad. Another therapist’s response to the questionnaire was a surprise: She returned the questionnaire uncompleted because she felt she didn’t know enough about the subject
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matter to answer any questions at all. This increased the sensitivity of the researcher to another reason for not completing a questionnaire: fear of self-recrimination. Rather than essentially asking therapists what they didn’t know, the focus was shifted to what their alternative assessment experience had been in graduate school and in their postgraduation work lives, including how much and where they sought out information on multicultural issues. These questions seemed to be more neutral and less threatening. Survey Design The final questionnaire was 10 pages long and included six main sections on 1) multicultural caseload demographics, 2) when and where they received professional training, 3) multicultural assessment training experience during and after their university training programs, 4) language exposure, 5) their employment status, and 6) an openended section for any comments on the topic of multicultural assessment or on the survey questionnaire itself. (See Appendix A for entire questionnaire.) There were a total of 26 questions, most of which involved check-lists and rankings. Following the “tailored design” method (Dillman, 2000) for self-administered survey questionnaires, the survey questionnaire was designed to encourage SLTs to feel engaged with the importance of the purpose of the research study, which is to promote greater assessment skills with diverse children. The stated purposes of the tailor-designed method are to encourage the respondent to engage in a “social exchange,” reduce survey error, and “maximize the quality and quantity of response” (Dillman, p 26). The questionnaire was short and easy to understand and complete. Eighteen of the questions were presented in tables that were answered by checking boxes in a grid, thereby minimizing text writing and keeping administration time short. The other
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questions required short answers of no more than one sentence each. Space was provided at the end of the questionnaire to provide additional comments as desired. The questionnaire was organized to present the least threatening and most engaging questions first. The first questions were also organized to set the stage for the overall theme of assessment and diversity. The idea was to get the therapists thinking about their caseloads and the assessment methods recommended during university training and in their work setting. Questions regarding their professional degree experience and work experience, such as years with the school district, were interspersed throughout the questionnaire, with personal experiences with language and dialects left to the end of the questionnaire. The questionnaire also was designed to generate answers that were clear and comprehensible, with questions that were applicable to all respondents. The focus was on facts that could be recalled and answered accurately and that would not create resistance to respond, that is, that were not offensive or anxiety-producing. In addition, the questions needed to be interpretable by the researcher. It was important to not include questions that implied an attitudinal bias regarding language assessment methods. Respondents were told they were free to add comments to any item.
Response Rate A total of 52 questionnaires were handed to therapists at two different sites and/or to therapists’ mailboxes. Twenty-two questionnaires were completed and returned by late November 2005, with a 42% response rate.
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Speech-Language Therapist Interviews Rationale The rationale for interviewing the SLTs was threefold: 1)
to get more detailed information on the therapists’ language background
and experience with multicultural assessment and practice; 2)
to observe firsthand their understanding of, and accuracy in, identifying
AAE features and differentiation of those features from language disorder features in MAE speaking children; and 3)
to collect any comments made while making their judgments that would
indicate their attitudes towards AAE and that might affect perception of risk for language disorder in African American children. These data would be used to compare with years since graduation and level of exposure to AAE-speaking children gathered in the questionnaire. The interview included an introduction to the researcher’s own background and interest in the topic of language diversity in speech-language assessment, presentation of the AANEI videoclips, and the SLTs’ listener judgment ratings of each child’s risk for language disorder and of their dialectal variation. These were followed by an open discussion of the topic of language diversity in the field and a debriefing about their experiences of the interview and of the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument videoclips, developed by me for the purpose of this study, and described below.
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Interview Protocol Rationale for the Instrument Michael Quinn Patton’s chapter on qualitative interviewing defines the interview guide as “a list of questions or issues that are to be explored in the course of an interview” which is prepared “in order to make sure that basically the same information is obtained from a number of people by covering the same material” (Patton, 1990, p. 283). The interview protocol is a flexible guideline that allows the interviewer to create a “conversational style” without losing the focus on the main topic. At the same time, it allows for data that can be more easily organized and analyzed. Design The interview protocol (see Appendix B) follows an “informal conversational” format. It includes five main sections: 1)
introductions;
2)
overview of the interview process;
3)
AANEI videoclip viewing and rating;
4)
general discussion on language diversity and assessment at the university
level and after; and 5)
debriefing on the process of the interview and rating process.
While this format provided a general framework for the interview, it also allowed for questions to be sequenced differently as needed with each interviewee in the course of the interview. Each interview was audiotaped in its entirety, usually with two tape recorders running simultaneously.
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A main concern was maintaining the comfort level of the speech-language therapist. To do this, the interviewer discussed with each interviewee the fact that the subject of dialectal variation assessment might be uncomfortable and informed them that if that were the case, she could decline to answer any question or stop the interview at any time. It was also important that the SLT understand that her participation and input was valued. The interviewer began each interview by thanking the participant for agreeing to spend a significant amount of time to discuss a very important topic in the field. A discussion of the reasons for studying this area of speech-language pathology as it arose from the researcher’s own practice and experience in the field with language diversity followed. To put the therapist at ease and familiarize the researcher with the SLT, the SLT was asked how she became interested in the field of communicative disorders. Videoclip Presentation Procedures The next portion of the interview concerned the procedure of viewing the videoclips and rating them. The therapist was informed that we were to view videoclips of narrative samples given by African American children between the ages of 4 and 8 years of age. Therapists were introduced to the narrative samples by presenting a still picture of each child. The therapist was given the name (a pseudonym) and age of each child and asked if she had ever seen the child before. Each therapist was then informed of the type of narrative and its title and the videoclip was viewed. Following the viewing of the videoclip, each therapist was asked for her “first impressions” of the child’s language in order to get spontaneous comments that might indicate any attitudes towards standard or nonstandard language form, content, and use.
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Next, the therapist was asked specifically to evaluate the child’s risk for language disorder and the child’s dialectal variation (MAE or AAE). African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument Rationale for the Instrument The instrument was developed to allow observation of speech-language therapists’ immediately available knowledge of African American English phonological and grammatical rule systems and of the therapists’ implied and/or stated attitudes towards Standard American and African American English dialects. Therapists were asked for their first immediate impressions of the children’s narrative performances with regard to perceived risk of language disorder and perceived use of dialect. This method of observation was less time-consuming than performing case studies of SLT assessment of African American children in “real-time” and less invasive for the children being evaluated. It also required less stringent oversight by the school district than would have been required with the observation of school district child participants. In addition, in this setting, SLTs had the rare opportunity to discuss their thought processes about the nature of AAE and the assessment of nonstandard English speaking children with another practicing SLT. Furthermore, the stimuli provided in the videoclips served as a constant variable to which the therapists could respond.
Development of the Instrument The development of the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument (AANEI), the elicitation of narratives, and analyses of the child narratives are fully
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described below, under Child Participants (Section IV) and Narrative Sample Analyses. A sample transcripts of the children’s narratives are found in Appendix H.
Design The African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument consisted of two components and had several stages of development. The first component consisted of 2 to 4 minute long narrative videoclips by 6 African American children ranging in age from 4 to 8. The second component of this instrument included two Listener Judgment Rating Scales devised for SLTs to quantify their impressions of two main aspects of in the children’s narrative language: risk for language disorder and use of dialectal variations. The 6 videoclips were produced by asking the children to “Tell me your favorite story.” The children were encouraged to speak with a minimal use of prompts so as to have as much continuous narration by the child as possible. Half of the narratives were delivered by children with typically developing language and half were by children with mild to moderate language disorders in the areas of phonology, syntax, and semantics. The children included in the AANEI demonstrated varying degrees of AAE dialect density that is they all used different levels of AAE phonological and grammatical markers in their narratives. Two of the typically developing children spoke low density AAE and one spoke high density AAE. Two of the language-disordered children spoke high density AAE, while one demonstrated a combination of dialectal use, with highdensity AAE phonological features and low-density AAE grammatical features.
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Listener Judgment Rating Scales Development and Rationale The creation and use of rating scales evolved from the first two interviews conducted in this study because those therapists found it difficult to categorically state whether the children appeared to be at risk or what dialect the children were speaking. Both therapists were hesitant to quantify their reactions to the children’s use of speech and language and their responses were hard to interpret. During the second interview, the researcher suggested that the therapist quantify her response regarding risk of disorder by placing the children’s risk on a scale of 1 to 5 where “1” equaled very low risk of language disorder and “5” equaled high risk of language disorder. Interestingly enough, that therapist responded using a rating scale of “1 to 10” and gave a rating of “5” for that child’s risk of disorder. After some discussion on what scale was to be used, the “1 to 10” scale was agreed upon because it seemed to make the therapist less anxious about rating the children, even though a “1 to 5” Likert scale is standard for rating. The scales were created thereafter out of a need help the therapists quantify their responses to questions about the children’s risk of disorder and dialectal variation. The final design of the rating scales used with the remaining 8 interview participants was modeled on Oetting and MacDonald’s (2002) listener judgment rating scale as used in their study on methods for characterizing nonmainstream dialect use in child language research, with the authors’ permission (personal communication with Oetting, 2005). However, it was adapted to the differing conditions between the two studies. In Oetting and MacDonald’s study three White doctoral linguistics students listened to 1-minute excerpts of 4 audiotaped language samples of African American and
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White 6-year-old children and were allowed 23 to 24 minutes to listen to each tape. In this study, the SLTs were rating 2- to 4-minute videotaped narrative samples that they only heard one time. This research’s version of the rating scale did not include percentages for each point on the scale because therapists did not have time to evaluate percentages of language features. A confidence scale was not included because it was undesirable for therapists who were relatively untrained in sociolinguistics and dialectal variations to feel intimidated about this more informal process. Also “narrative style” was added to the list of language features that the therapists used to make their judgments. This was done because the SLTs were likely to want to comment on narrative style were rating narrative samples, especially because this method of evaluation has been an increasingly common area of interest in speech-language training and continuing education. Design The Listener Judgment Rating Scales (see Appendices C and D) consist of four major sections: a holistic rating key, a 10-point Likert scale, a checklist of language feature categories that may have informed judgments, and questions about the effect of sample characteristics on judgment. A “holistic rating key” was provided at the top of the rating scales to guide the therapists’ ratings. Both Listener Judgment Rating Scales included a holistic rating scale, a 10-point Likert scale, a list of characteristics to guide the judgments and a section regarding the quality of the videotape. On the Dialect Listener Judgment Rating Scale, 1 equaled “No use of AAE” and 10 equaled “Heavy use of AAE.” On the Risk for Language Disorder Listener Judgment Rating Scale, 1 equaled “very low risk of language
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disorder,” 5 to 6 equaled “Medium risk of language disorder” and 10 equaled “High risk of language disorder.” These scales gave therapists space to assign rates with the least amount of hesitancy. The checklist of language features that informed judgments included paralinguistics (including stress and intonation), syntax and morphology, vocabulary, and narrative style. Therapists were also encouraged to state if sample length, sound quality, child intelligibility, or other considerations impacted their ability to rate dialect or risk of disorder. There were no comments by SLTs on sample length or sound quality. However, many of the SLTs commented on the poor intelligibility of the two 4-year-olds, both of whom had mild language disorders which included noticeable use of phonological processes. SLTs also commented on the difference between viewing a videoclip and interacting directly with a child to form their judgments. Risk of Disorder Listener Judgment Rating Scale The first rating scale was presented to elicit and quantify the therapists’ impressions of the children’s risk of language disorder. More specifically, the scale attempted to measure the SLTs’ perception of any degree and/or combination of markers in speech and expressive language that they associated with child language disorder. Typical markers of language disorder that would be noticed in narrative production are problems of execution such as use of fewer words, propositions, and embedded clauses, and difficulties in repairing story meaning (Leonard, 2000, p. 85), as well as markers such as use of pronouns, verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, unspecific vocabulary, and poor intelligibility.
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Dialect Listener Judgment Rating Scale The second rating scale examined therapists’ perceptions of the children’s use of phonological and grammatical dialectal variations in their speech and language. The context of their perceptions were limited to MAE on one end of the scale and AAE on the other end of the scale, with varying degrees of usage of both in the middle range. Typical areas of difference between MAE and AAE include rules for subject-verb agreement, tense marking, regular and irregular verb construction, plural noun marking, and phonological rules for the production of sounds within words and in sentences. The other portion of the methods used in this research was the design and production of the AANEI. This included the selection and evaluation of child participants, the interview of their parents and guardians, and the videotaping of the narrative samples. IV.
Child Participants
Population and Sample Rationale The child population was African American children in the community at large between the ages of 4 and 9 years. Children were recruited from sources other than the school district the SLTs belonged to because to minimize the chances that the therapists would have formed preconceptions about the children’s language. In particular, children within the SLTs’ school district with language disorders might have had prior contact with the SLTs. Therefore, children who would most likely be equally unknown to all of the SLTs were recruited to produce the narrative samples.
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The age range of 4 to 9 years was chosen because this is the range targeted by the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation - Screening Test (DELV-ST, Seymour, Roeper, & deVilliiers, 2003a) to children with different levels of dialectal variation and of risk of language disorder. Population Sample The selection criteria for the child participants included: 1)
age of 4 to 7 years;
2)
African American ethnicity;
3)
no hearing, neurological or intellectual impairments;
4)
living and going to school in a district different from that of the SLTs’ place of work.
The age criterion was originally set at 5 to 7 years because those are the ages for which the criterion-referenced screening test used (DELV-ST) had the strongest reliability (de Villiers, Roeper, Seymour, & Pearson, 2003). Children with hearing, intellectual, or frank neurological impairments were excluded to keep the variable of language development independent from other factors. The use of child participants that were not from the public school system made access to the children easier and decreased the likelihood that the SLTs would have prior acquaintance with the children. Sampling Procedures The child participants were recruited from several Bay Area African American community locations, including a large church, two beauty parlors, and a Bay Area private school that served primarily African American children. Children were also solicited from my place of work, a non-profit language and learning clinic in the Bay
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Area. The children were initially chosen by convenience sampling, which is sampling “based on availability and ease of data collection” rather than of suitability to research objectives (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998, p. 76). Flyers were left in the community that recruited African American children between 5 and 7 years of age who liked talking about events in their lives. All children who matched those criteria were initially accepted into the study for parent interviews and child language assessment. Purposive sampling was used to select the child participants to provide narrative samples for presentation to the SLTs. Purposive sampling is defined as “selection of individuals…based on specific purposes in lieu of random sampling and on the basis of information available about these individuals” (Tashakkori & Teddlie, p. 76). Those children who matched various combinations of dialectal variation and language competence, and whose narratives were intelligible, were accepted for the final phase of the study. One parent responded to a flyer she picked up at a beauty parlor, and the 10 remaining respondents were parents of children who attended the private school. When permission was requested from the Head of the school to leave flyers at the abovementioned school site, the researcher was invited to address the Parent-Teacher Association where the focus and purpose of the study — to improve the language assessment of African American children in American schools – was explained. Response Rate Families of 11 children who responded to the flyers were invited for the first phase of the development of the AANEI. The first phase included child language screenings, parent questionnaires and interviews, and child narrative videotaping. Ten of the 11 participants invited came for the screenings, parent interviews, and narrative
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videotaping sessions, which were conducted in December 2005 and January 2006 in classrooms of the private school. Child Participant Characteristics Of the 10 children initially screened, 6 were chosen to be included in the AANEI videoclips later presented to the SLT participants. The children included 2 boys and 4 girls, with ages ranging from 4:1 to 7:5, and their language variation represented a range from MAE to Strong Variation from MAE, according to test results from the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation – Screening Test (DELV-ST, Seymour et al., 2003a) (see Table 2 below). Table 2: Child Participant Characteristics Child Age Gender Participant 1 6:10 F 2 5:11 F 3 7:5 M 4 4:2 F 5 6:7 M 6 4:1 F
Degree of Language Variation Strong MAE MAE Strong Strong Strong
The children’s parents or guardians were asked to complete questionnaires and then were interviewed to gather additional information about the children’s histories. Participants Six videotapes of narrative samples of children who participated in the first phase of the AALEI were made on the same days as the administration of the DELV-ST in December 2005 and January 2006. All were sufficiently intelligible to be reliably transcribed (intelligibility was between 98% and 100% for the typically developing children, and between 77% and 100% for the language-disordered children). The demographic characteristics of the final child participant sample, who were tested with
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both the DELV-ST and DELV-NR tests, and who provided narrative samples, are summarized below in Table 3. Table 3: Child Participant Demographics Demographic Typically Characteristic Developing n 3 Age Mean 6.7 Sex Male 1 Female 2 Race/Ethnicity African American 3 Region of U.S. West Parent Education Level (years of schooling) 0-11 0 12 1 13-15 1 16+ 1
Language Disordered 3 5.0
Overall Sample
1 2
2 4
3 West
6 West
0 0 1 2
0 1 2 3
6 5.9
Instrumentation and Data Collection Rationale and Procedures It was important to objectively define the nature of the dialectal variations used by the ten children who participated in the study and their levels of language development. Language assessment methods for African American children are notably scarce, and SLTs are cautioned to use alternative assessment methods in the absence of appropriately normed standardized tests. Therefore, two testing methods specifically geared toward child African American English speakers were used to evaluate the child participants’ dialectal variation and density and language competence. Two communicative disorders graduate students, both African American women, were trained as research assistants and conducted the initial screening of the children and
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interviews of the parents. The first measurement of dialectal variation was the administration by one of the research assistants of the DELV-ST (Seymour et al., 2003a), a criterion-referenced test that screens for dialectal variation (and risk for disorder). This screening allowed me to select children who met my selection criteria for AAE and MAE speech and language. This test was administered primarily to determine the presence and extent of the children’s use of Mainstream American English and/or African American English. The second method of determining the children’s dialectal variation was a careful transcription of each narrative sample, two of which were confirmed by another SLT experienced in transcribing children’s language samples. The transcription and reliability check were followed by type-token analysis of phonological and grammatical markers using criterion lists created by African American child language researcher measures (Craig, Thompson, Washington, & Potter, 2003; Oetting & McDonald, 2001; Washington & Craig, 1994). Craig, Washington, and Thompson-Porter’s (1998) dialect density measure (DDM) was used to determine the extent of phonological and grammatical density in the narrative samples themselves and compared with the DELVST results. The language competence of each child was determined by 3 different methods: the administration of the standardized Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation – Norm-Referenced test (DELV-NR; Seymour et al., 2005), the use of Systematic Analysis of Language Samples (SALT) (Miller & Iglesias, 2006) to compare the children’s syntax and semantic development to age peers in a Wisconsin language sample database, and parental report of language competence on the parent questionnaires.
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Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation – Screening Test (DELV-ST) Design The DELV-ST (Seymour, et al., 2003a) is currently the only screening test for dialectal variation. The DELV is a criterion-referenced screening test, the purpose of which is to help test administrators distinguish between variations due to normal developmental language changes, or to regional and cultural patterns of language difference, from MAE language disorder markers. According to the test manual, this “test is appropriate for use with children who speak Mainstream American English (MAE) or some variation from MAE, such as African American English (AAE)” (Seymour, et al., 2003a; p. 1). There are two parts to the DELV-ST. Part I determines Language Variation Status and Part II determines Diagnostic Risk Status and enables clinicians to distinguish children who may be at risk for a language disorder from those who appear to be developing language normally. The Language Variation Status section of the DELV-ST is designed to assess phoneme production and morpho-syntactic structures produced within sentence contexts. The items are grouped according to the phonological or morpho-syntactic structure being targeted. The most common responses given by children during standardization are listed on the Record Form. Column A responses are those typically given by children who speak AAE. Column B responses are those typically given by children who speak MAE. Column C responses are those that do not include the targeted structure. The Diagnostic Risk Status section of the DELV-ST (Seymour, et al., 2003a) includes two sets of items. The first set of items is designed to assess the child’s
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production of certain morpho-syntactic structures, as well as his or her understanding of complex “wh-questions”. “Wh-questions” are questions that include “who, what, where, how, when, why and how many” and are structures that are typically difficult for children with language disorders. The second set of items is designed to assess the child’s ability to remember unfamiliar non-words and repeat them. Children with language disorders often have difficulty with sequencing of sounds within words, which is most apparent with unfamiliar words. Column A responses are those most typically given by children with normally developing language skills. Column B responses are those most typically given by children diagnosed with a language disorder. Column C responses are nontargeted responses that may include some grammatically correct answers. Two scores result from this screening test: a Language Variation Status score and a Diagnostic Risk Status score. The Language Variation Status score enables the clinician to determine if a child is predominantly using features of MAE or features that vary from MAE. The Diagnostic Risk Status score indicates where a child is on the “at risk” continuum and if he or she needs to be evaluated further. It is important to state that a screening test is by definition a less sensitive test of language abilities than a comprehensive language test. This is due to the limited range and number of times used in the interest of performing a quick triage of language-typical children from language-impaired children. If a child appears to be at risk for language disorder according to a screening test, further, more comprehensive testing is warranted. Because the present study judges how accurately SLTs judge children’s risk for disorder, it was important that all of the child participants receive follow-up testing with the more comprehensive DELV-NR (Seymour et al., 2005).
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Procedures A research assistant who was experienced in administering standardized tests was familiarized with the DELV-ST (Seymour, et al., 2003a) in one teaching session. She was then asked to practice using the DELV-ST for one month prior to screening the child participants. Her administrations of the test to the 10 children were audiotaped. The lead researcher was familiar with DELV-ST testing and scoring procedures having used it for one year since its publication in 2003. After the screening sessions, the research assistant was debriefed on each child’s test results and confirmed scoring accuracy. In addition, I re-tested one of the children myself. The re-test demonstrated scores that produced different dialectal variation and degree of risk for a language disorder categories. The research assistant scores for Child 6 translated to “some variation from MAE” and “highest risk for a disorder,” whereas alternative screening administration almost 2 weeks later resulted in “strong variation from MAE” and “medium to high risk for disorder.” The other five children (Child 1 through Child 5) who participated in the production of the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument were not rescreened because they were re-evaluated for language development level later with the more comprehensive Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation – NR (Seymour, et al., 2005) and their narratives were analyzed extensively for AAE dialect density, thereby providing more definitive measurements of dialectal variation and of language development levels. Given that the lead researcher had more experience with Child 6 and with administering the DELV-ST, those scores are reported in Chapter 4.
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Parent Questionnaire Rationale Parent questionnaires and interviews are a standard part of child language assessment in the field of speech-language pathology. In a language assessment, the therapist collects data, including records and case history, parent interview and questionnaire data, and directly examines the child, often using one or more standardized tests as well as taking a language sample (Paul, 1995, p. 20). From a qualitative research perspective, parent questionnaires and interviews are an important part of triangulation Gathering data from parent questionnaires, language sample analysis, and standardized test results provided several perspectives on each child’s communication behaviors. The parent’s knowledge of the child’s history and behaviors was essential to confirm that their child’s speech and language history at home, at school, and in the test results were not specific only to one set of conditions, since children can demonstrate different language competencies according to the setting in which they find themselves. If children’s behaviors on the test results did not match up with their behaviors at school or at home, the test results would be considered suspect and the result of the testing environment or poor test administration. In this study, the parent’s questionnaires and follow-up interviews, along with language sample analysis and standardized test results, were used to provide triangulation and credibility to the diagnostic conclusion of the presence or absence of language and/or communicative difficulties in the children. The questionnaire data was also used to confirm that none of the children presented intellectual, hearing, or neurological impairments, and to establish the parents’ level of education.
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Design The parent questionnaire was based on and modified from the Oakland Scottish Rite Language Center Parent Questionnaire in Oakland, California. The main sections of the questionnaire included the following: 1)
Identification: demographic data such as birth date and address;
2)
School History, including special education placement;
3)
Prenatal and Birth History;
4)
Early Development;
5)
Speech History;
6)
Medical History;
7)
Family History;
8)
Behaviors
Procedures The children’s parents or caregivers were asked to complete extensive parent questionnaires in advance of their interviews in order to collect information on prenatal and birth status, information on general medical information, social and language development, and academic skills that could demonstrate the general developmental status of the child. One of the research assistants was trained in conducting the interview one month prior to the parent interview sessions, and was asked to familiarize herself with the contents of the questionnaire. The parents brought their questionnaires with them to the interview and the interviewer used these to guide the interview process. The research assistant interviewed
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the parents about the children’s development and how the children’s behaviors compared to those of other siblings or age peers in the community. The interviews were audiotaped with the permission of the parents or caregivers. Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation – Norm-Referenced Test (DELV-NR) Rationale The DELV-NR (Seymour, et al., 2005) was used to evaluate the children’s language development because it is designed to evaluate only those language features that are common to both standard and nonstandard English dialect speakers. More importantly, the dialectal variations used by nonstandard English speakers are not under consideration as markers of language disorder and so cannot be used to identify signs of language disorder. Standard morphological testing items such as subject-verb agreement, plural “s” use, or past tense “ed” markers are abandoned in favor of “Wh-question,” passive tense, and article use items. The Syntax, Pragmatics, Semantics, and Phonology domain items focus on a child’s ability to be an effective communicator rather than on his or her ability to speak MAE, an important distinction for SLTs evaluating an AAE-speaker. While the DELVNR test instructions are carried out in MAE, it has been demonstrated in various studies that examiner dialect use does not have a significant effect on the dialect used by children in response to test stimuli. No MAE language is being modeled for the children on any of the test items as is common on MAE-based tests. This test is uniquely appropriate to the AAE-speaking child participants in a study on differential diagnosis of language difference from language disorder.
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Design The DELV-Norm Referenced Test (Seymour, et al., 2005) is designed to identify speech and language disorders in speakers of any American dialect. The NormReferenced Test produces standard scores and percentiles based on a standardization or norming sample of children from across the country. It enables clinicians to assess aspects of language that are common to all varieties of English and that are critical to the development of language competence. Because the test measures these universal aspects of language, clinicians can use it to identify a child as having a speech or language disorder regardless of the variety of English the children speaks. This test comprises four domains: Syntax, Pragmatics, Semantics, and Phonology. The Syntax Domain includes items that assess three sub-domains: Wh-questions, passives, and articles. It assesses a child’s understanding of wh-movement (wh-question forms) in sentences, different types of passive sentence constructions, and appropriate use of articles. The Pragmatics Domain includes items that assess three sub-domains: communicative role-taking, short narrative, and question asking. They assess the child’s ability to take another perspective in speech acts, discourse skills, and wh-question asking. The Semantics Domain includes four sub-domains: verb contrast, preposition contrast, quantifiers, and fast mapping. These items assess a child’s lexical (vocabulary) organization and his or her ability to contrast verbs, contrast prepositions, understand quantifiers, and learn new meanings from sentence contexts (fast mapping).
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The Phonology Domain assesses the accuracy of a child’s production of consonant clusters in the initial and medial position of words within the context of a sentence. Scoring of the individual domains is based on scaled scores for syntax, pragmatics, and semantics and a percentile ranking for phonology. Scaled scores can be adjusted according to parental education levels (PELs). A Total Language Composite score is derived from the scaled (or adjusted scale) scores of the child. Procedures Six children were administered the DELV-NR based on their DELV-ST scores because of the combinations of their dialectal variation (MAE to strong variation from MAE) and their degree of risk for language disorder (lowest risk to highest risk). Four of the child participants were administered the DELV-NR at the private school site and two were tested in a quiet location at a local public library as requested by the parent, to confirm their language development status indicated on the DELV-ST. V.
Production of the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument
Rationale: Why Narrative Samples? Lund and Duchan (1993) argue for naturalistic assessment contexts “to find patterns that emerge when the child is part of a communicative interaction.” What is considered a “naturalistic context” is relative to cultural norms. While some researchers use picture description tasks to obtain child language samples, the literature suggests African American children regard providing information that is obvious to the listener as illogical. At the same time, African American culture places high value on storytelling
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performance. A narrative then allows the African American child to demonstrate her or his creativity and style in language use in a positive and engaging way. Language samples are often conversational in nature to allow the SLT to interact with the child, test areas of language comprehension and performance such as syntax and semantics, and to demonstrate the child’s pragmatic skills in making conversational repairs. However, conversational samples held a number of disadvantages for the purpose of this study. First of all, because of the 2- to 4-minute time limit of the videoclips, a conversational exchange would have allowed for fewer of the child’s utterances than would a narrative monologue. Secondly, the narrative samples were a way to provide the SLT with uninterrupted speech and language that was not mediated by the listener’s evaluative comments or requests for communication repairs. This was especially true for the older children’s narrative samples. In the case of the younger children, there was some, but still limited, verbal interaction between the child and the researcher to keep their play narratives going. There are several reasons for using narrative language samples to capture a snapshot of children’s dialectal variation and language competence. First of all, narrative samples provide a comprehensive picture of a child’s language competence. As Leonard (1999) states: Narratives require considerable skill in manipulating language, whether they are in the form of telling a fictional story, providing an account of a previous experience, or retelling a story heard from someone else. For example, betweenas well as within-sentence syntactic devices are needed for the sake of cohesion, presuppositions must be adjusted on line to take into account information just told to the listener, and the numerous speech acts conveyed as portions of the dialogue must be coordinated and kept subservient to the overarching speech act of telling a story (p. 85).
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Secondly, during a narrative production, children become engrossed in their own role as performer, are less self- conscious, allowing for more natural language production, and ideally, are less influenced by listener characteristics. Design and Production of the African American Narrative Evaluation Instrument (AANEI) The narrative evaluation instrument designed for the present study (AANEI) included a digital videodisc (DVD) of the six child participants’ narratives and two listener judgment rating scales (Appendices C and D). The goal in selecting the child participants was to obtain a 2 x 2 matrix of dialectal variation and language development characteristics (see Table 4 below), to include: 1) MAE (or low density AAE) and typical language development, 2) MAE (or low density AAE) and language disorder, 3) high density AAE and typical language development, and 4) high density AAE and language disorder. Table 4: Dialectal Variation and Language Development Matrix Dialectal Variation Language Development
Low AAE Density
High AAE Density
Typically Developing
X
X
Language Disordered
X
X
Procedures for the Narrative Sample Collection There were three narrative sample collection sessions. The first and second sessions were held in the same elementary level classroom in the private school. The children were seated at child-sized furniture facing the researcher, who sat out of view of the camera. A videographer taped each session with a Sony Handycam (TRV58)
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camcorder. The video camera and tripod were located approximately 5 feet behind the researcher. The third session was taped at the language clinic where the lead researcher worked to give the children a familiar environment in which to interact, and in which there were no third parties such as the videographer. Both sessions were recorded using a Sony Handycam (TRV58). Child 5 was videotaped in a clinic room seated at an adultsized table. The camcorder was mounted on a tripod and situated approximately 3 feet behind the table and in such a way as to film only the child. Child 6 was videotaped in a playroom at the same clinic. The videocamera was situated approximately 2 feet from the child. The researcher sat on the floor and the child stood holding her Bratz doll as a prop. Each taping session lasted approximately 5 minutes and the tapes were later transferred to the I-Movie program on a PowerBook G4 Macintosh laptop by a technician at the U.C. Berkeley Audio-Visual department. In each videotaping, whether at the school or the clinic, rapport was established with the children before videotaping by having a light conversation about their interests. The researcher told them that she wanted to record them telling their favorite story. The researcher asked for their consent and told them that they would be given a ToysRUs gift certificate as a reward after the taping was over. When the videotaping began, I talked to the children about their chosen topics. Once the videographer determined that the lighting and positioning was adequate, I had the children begin their narratives. I encouraged them throughout their narratives with my full attention, playful interactions, and an open and non-judgmental attitude.
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Construction of the Narrative Sample DVD The DVD begins with the title “Language Diversity Project” followed by the first frame of one of the six videoclips with the a “still” shot of the first frame showing the child narrating with his or her pseudonym and age in years and months printed below his or her picture. This frame was followed by a still shot of the narrative title, after which the narrative itself begins. The narratives were presented in their entirety, with the exception of those of Child 1 and Child 4. The Child 1 narrative was more than 5 minutes in length and was cropped to 3 minutes, 13 seconds. Child 4’s narrative was edited and cut into 2 separate stories and included the researcher’s backchanneling comments. This narrative was edited to exclude my use of her name and most of my communicative repair requests. A professional video editor edited the original videotapes, spliced them into videoclips as I requested, added the title frame, and created buttons for independent access to each videoclip. Videoclips 1 through 3 were the narratives of the children with typically developing language and videoclips 4 through 6 were the narratives of the children with language-disorders. 1)
Introduction to the DVD – name of the project: Language Diversity Project.
2)
Name of the narrative
3)
Pseudonym and age of the child
4)
Presentation of child narrative videoclip
After the narrative sample videoclips were shown to the SLTs, I asked them to give their first impressions of the children’s language, to quantify their impressions with scores from the Listener Judgment Rating scales, and then engaged in a discussion with
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them about their ratings. At the end of the interview, I asked each SLT what it was like to go through the process of viewing and rating the children. VI.
Narrative Samples and Analyses This section includes sample collection, transcription procedures, description of
the narrative sample characteristics, and a summary of the performance and contents of each child’s narrative. The analyses of the phonological and grammatical features and dialect density measures, and the SALT language sample analyses are provided in the Results and Data Analysis chapter that follows. Sample Collection and Transcription Procedures I transcribed narrative samples into standard orthography by importing the narrative videoclips into HyperTranscribe transcription program Version 1.5b4 (Researchware, 2007). The standard orthographic transcriptions were converted into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using SIL Encore IPA (Doulos SIL Font, 2007). Two of the narrative sample IPA transcriptions were coded by a second experienced SLT, with 90%+ reliability rates on each. The researcher then conducted type/token AAE feature analyses as recommended by Oetting and MacDonald (2002) and ran “Standard Measures” SALT analyses with comparisons to the Wisconsin age-peer narrative database (+/- 6 months). VII.
Summary This chapter has been a complete review of my methodology and approach to the
research topic of SLT listener dialect judgment. Given the variety of data collected, both from the SLTs and the children themselves, the next chapter, Chapter 4, will present the
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findings from the child narrative analyses results, SLT survey questionnaire, the Listener Judgment Rating Scales, and the SLTs’ evaluative comments. Chapter 4: Data Analysis and Results I.
Introduction This chapter presents the data collected in the present study and the analyses of
that data. The first section of this chapter includes a summary of the child participants according to the results from the dialect screening and language assessments, the parent interview data, a summary of the characteristics of the child narratives, and the results of the child narrative analyses. The second section contains findings from 15 of the original group of SLTs who completed survey questionnaires (7 of the original 22 surveyed SLTs were excluded because they were not born or raised in the U.S.), organized according to major topics of the questionnaires. The third section is a two-part analysis of the results of 7 of the SLTs who completed the Listener Judgment Rating Scales for dialect and risk for disorder. The Listener Judgment Rating Scale section includes a summary of the patterns found in the ratings on each of the two scales, and an analysis of the effects of dialectal variation and language development on the SLTs’ judgments. In the fourth section, the evaluative comments of all 10 interviewed SLTs are examined for emerging themes with regard to SLT confidence about judging AAE, SLT perceptions of AAE characteristics, SLT attitudes towards AAE and MAE, and the confluence of the concepts of “dialect” and “language disorder.” The research questions asked in the present study included: 1)
Are SLTs able to accurately differentiate between MAE and AAE dialects?
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2)
Is there a meaningful pattern that emerges from accuracies and inaccuracies in dialectal perceptions?
3)
How accurate are the SLTs in judging risk for language disorder in AAE children?
4)
What patterns in dialect perception and risk for disorder judgments exist, if any?
5)
What kind of instruction did SLTs receive at the university level and after graduation in language diversity and multicultural assessment?
6)
What effect do university and post-graduate multicultural assessment method instruction have on SLT accuracy in dialect and risk for disorder ratings?
The research questions are addressed in this chapter in the three main sections following the presentation of the child participant data. II.
Child Participant Results
Child Participant Characteristics The characteristics of the 6 African American children included in the study are summarized in Table 5 below. There were 2 boys and 4 girls, whose ages ranged from 4:1 to 7:5, with a mean age of 5.9 years, and all were natives of California. The dialect density of the children varied from low-density AAE, or MAE on the DELV-ST, to highdensity AAE, or a Strong Variation from MAE, according to the DELV-ST (Seymour Roeper, & deVilliers, 2003a). The characterization of the dialectal variation can vary according to the social context of the speech acts, as will be demonstrated in the narrative analysis section.
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Table 5: Child Participant Characteristics Child Participant Age 1 2 3 4 5 6
6:10 5:11 7:5 4:2 6:7 4:1
Gender F F M F M F
Degree of Language Variation Strong MAE MAE Strong Strong Strong
The socioeconomic status of the children was determined by the parents’ education levels. All of the parents had finished high school, two had some college education, and three had completed bachelor’s degrees. Parent Questionnaire Results Five of the children’s parents and one guardian were asked to complete questionnaires and then were interviewed to gather additional information about the children’s histories. What follows is a summary of the information gathered in the questionnaires and subsequent interviews about the questionnaires. Speech and Language Development Three of the 6 children (Child 1 through 3) had no history of speech or language impairments, although Child 2 and Child 3 had siblings with a history of language delays or impairments. Three children had histories of language delay or impairment (Child 4 through 6), and 2 of those with language impairment had been previously identified as having both speech and language impairments (Child 5 and Child 6). One of the children with language impairments (Child 6) was still receiving speech and language therapy at the time of the study. One of the 6 children with no history of speech or language
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impairments but had two half-siblings with speech and/or speech and language impairments (Child 3). Child 2 and Child 4, and Child 5 and Child 6 were siblings. Developmental History The developmental histories of two out of the three typically developing children (Child 2 and Child 3) did not reveal any risk markers for language learning problems. Child 1, however, was born prematurely, which is considered a risk factor for developmental disorders including speech and/or language disorder. Three of the language-impaired children (Child 4, 5, and 6) had had delayed onset of speech and had been found to be difficult to understand at some point in their speech and language development. Child 4 was also born prematurely. None of the six children were considered by their families to have intellectual, hearing, or neurological deficits. Language Assessment Results The Total Language Composite Score on the DELV-NR (Seymour et al., 2005) is derived from a composite of the Syntax, Pragmatics, and Semantics Domain scores. The severity of a disorder on the DELV-NR is determined by the deviation of the child’s Total Language Composite scores from the mean of 100, with a standard deviation of 15. An average Total Language Score is any score between 86 and 114. Scores of 115 and above are considered above average, scores between 78 and 85 are considered to be marginal, borderline, or indicative of a mild impairment, and scores between 71 and 77 are considered to be low, or indicative of a moderate language impairment.
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Table 6: DELV-NR Guidelines for Describing the Severity of a Language Disorder Total Language Score Classification Relationship to Mean 115 and above Above average +1 SD and above 86 to 114 Average Within + or – 1 SD 78 to 85 Marginal /Borderline/Mild Within -1 to -1.5 SD 71 to 77 Low range/Moderate Within -1.5 to -2.5 70 and below Very low range/Severe -2SD and below From Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers. (DELV-Norm Referenced Test, 2005, PsychCorps/Harcourt Assessment) Using these ranges, Child 1 to 3 had average scores. Child 4 and 6 had borderline scores, or mildly impaired language, and Child 5 had low scores, or moderately impaired language. The individual domain scores of the DELV-NR can be analyzed for patterns of strength or weakness in different language areas, determined by differences from the mean scaled score. The average domain scaled score is 10, with a standard deviation (SD) of 3. Scores of 5 to 6 are one SD below the mean and would be classified as mildly impaired language in that domain. Scores between 14 and 15 are more than one SD above the mean and are considered to be above average. The scores on the phonology domain of the DELV-NR are considered to indicate the need for further evaluation if they are in the 16th percentile or lower. See Table 7 for more details. The relative language strengths and weakness and overall language development status of the 6 children are demonstrated in Table 7 below.
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Table 7: Child Language Profiles per DELV Norm-Referenced Test Child Syntax Pragmatics Semantics Phonology Total Language Adjusted Adjusted Adjusted Percentile Composite Scaled Scaled Scaled Rank Score Score Score Score 1 7 9 7 18-21 86 2 9 14 12 41-100 111 3 8 9 11 27-100 95 4 5 9 8 11-12 84 5
5
5
6
14-17
77
6
7
7
7
28-30
82
Language Status
Typical Typical Typical Mild Disorder Moderate Disorder Mild Disorder
Child 1 had relative weaknesses in syntax and semantics and overall typically developing language. Child 2 and Child 3 had average to above average scores in all domains and overall typically developing language. Child 4 demonstrated pronounced weaknesses in syntax and phonology and mildly impaired language overall. Child 5 had pronounced weaknesses across all domains and borderline scores in phonology. His overall language status was moderate language impairment. Child 6 had borderline scores across all domains except for phonology, which was average for her age. Her language development status was mild language impairment. Table 8: Dialectal Variation and Language Development Matrix per DELV-ST & DELV-NR Characterizations Dialectal Variation Language Development Low AAE Density
High AAE Density
Typically Developing
2
1
Language Impaired
0
3
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The results of the dialectal variation per the DELV-ST and language development status per the DELV-NR demonstrated a child participant sample that did not fill all four quadrants of a variables matrix that would be most desirable for the purposes of this study. Ideally, I would have at least one child in each quadrant of the matrix. However, according to the DELV-ST, there was no child who could fill the MAE/language impaired quadrant (quadrant 3). Child 3, who had scored in the medium to high risk for language disorder on the DELV-ST, subsequently scored within the average range on the more comprehensive DELV-NR. However, the dialect/language development status of Child 5, which was high-density AAE/language impaired was modified during his narrative sample (discussed further below) because he relied heavily on an MAE-based text to produce his oral narrative. Therefore, the final narrative-based dialect status placed one child in each quadrant of the matrix, as shown in Table 9 below. Table 9: Dialectal Variation and Language Development per Narrative Sample DDMs and DELV-NR Characterization Dialectal Variation Language Development Low AAE Density
High AAE Density
Typically Developing
2
1
Language Impaired
1
2
Summary of Child Narratives and Analyses The children produced narratives between 2 minutes, 15 seconds and 3 minutes, 29 seconds in length. The mean age of the typically developing children was 6.7 years; while the mean age of the language impaired children was 5.0 years. The titles and narrative types are provided in Table 10 below.
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Table 10: Summary of Child Narratives Child Age Title 1 2 3
6:10 5:11 7:5
4
4:1
5 6
6:11 4:0
The Nutcracker The Giant and the Little Girl Spiderman: The Movie
Narrative Type
Event Description Fictional Story Retelling of Movie Madagascar Penguins/Birthday Retelling of Party Story Movie/Play Narrative Gordon Goes Camping Retelling of Book Bratz Dolls Out and About Play Narrative
Time (min:secs) 3:13 2:30 2:22 2:15 2:33 3:29
Their narrative types varied according to age and level of language impairment, from simple sequences of events with little or no cohesive ties, to event descriptions and story retellings, to fictional stories. The children who were typically developing had no difficulty choosing and maintaining a narrative of their own. The children with language impairment needed scaffolding to start and maintain their narratives, including a story to re-tell and dolls as props. Most of the stories were chosen by the children and were spontaneously produced. Child 5 however had such difficulty uttering more than a few words, that I asked him to read a familiar story out loud and then re-tell it to me. Child 6 likewise had difficulty producing a narrative, but when provided with a Bratz doll, told an extensive, rambling story about the doll’s adventures. Having different types of narrative had several consequences. First of all, there was no one basic narrative content or structure against which the SLTs could make comparisons of the children’s performances. Secondly, the SLTs had to make sense of each child’s story, which was often difficult in the case of the children with impaired phonology and/or language. Had the narratives all been based on the same story content, it would have been easier for the SLTs to make judgments based on language content,
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form, and use. On the other hand, if I had elicited one particular story for all of the children to tell, their narratives would not have been spontaneous and may not have represented their language abilities as well. Finally, the fact that the older children and younger children were at different stages of narrative development meant that the SLTs had to shift from one set of criteria to another and made comparisons between the children more difficult. The younger children also had more phonological substitutions and other processes that made them harder to understand. Language Characteristics of the Narrative Samples Typically the minimum number of utterances gathered for a language sample is 50 or 100. Because these samples were meant for brief videoclips, they are not standardsized samples. The overall mean size of the samples was 34.7 child utterances, with a range of 28 to 52 utterances. The mean size of the samples of the typically developing (TD) children was 39 utterances, with a range of 31 to 52 utterances. The mean size of the samples of the language-impaired (LI) children was 30, with a range of 28 to 31 utterances. Language sample size is typically shorter for children with language impairment, although size can vary according to context and motivation. Language Variation: Types of Features — Phonological and Grammatical AAE Phonological Features The types of AAE phonological features found across all of the children’s narrative samples totaled 12, all of which are found in the literature on child AAE development (Craig, Washington, & Thompson-Porter, 2003; Adger & Schilling-Estes, 2003; Stockman, 1996b; Wolfram, 1994) and are summarized in Table 11 below in order of greatest frequency to lowest. For example, consonant cluster reduction was used by
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100% of the children at least one once, while I/E merge was used by only 17% of the children. Most of these phonological features are also features of MAE-based phonological disorders. Table 11: Most Frequently Used Phonological Feature Types listed in Descending Order Number Phonological Type % Used 1 Consonant Cluster Reduction (CCR) 100 2 L Vocalization or Omission (LVOC) 100 3 Nasalization of Absent Consonant (NAS) 100 4 Post-Vocalic Consonant Reduction (PCR) 100 5 Substitution of “th” (SUBSTH) 100 6 Devoicing of Final Consonant (DFC) 83 7 Unstressed Syllable Reduction (SDL) 83 8 Monophthongization of Diphthongs (MONO) 67 9 Vowel Lengthening (Vowel-L) 67 10 “G Dropping” 50 11 R Vocalization or Omission (RVOC) 50 12 I/E Merge 17 A sample coded narrative demonstrating the use of AAE specific phonological types and tokens by one child, with total number of tokens, can be found in Appendix I. The number of AAE phonological features used by all of the children ranged from 47 to 140 tokens. The average number of AAE phonological tokens used by the low dialect density (LDD) speaking/typically developing children was 51 tokens, while the one highdensity (HDD) typically developing child (Child 1) used a total 106 tokens. The number of AAE phonological tokens used by the 3 language-impaired children (Child 4 through Child 6) ranged from 91 to 140, with a mean of 111 tokens. The low-density AAE speaker with language impairment (Child 5) had 91 phonological tokens, while the two high-density AAE speaking children with language impairment (Child 4 and 6) had an average of 121.5 phonological tokens. The very high number of phonological tokens in one of the younger high-density/language impaired children
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(Child 6) may due more to phonological impairment than to AAE dialect, demonstrating the complexity of differential diagnosis in similar dialects, especially in young children who are still developing phonologically. AAE Grammatical Features I transcribed the child narratives in standard orthography and hand-coded them for AAE grammatical features using a list combining taxonomies from Oetting & MacDonald (2002), Washington & Craig (1994), and Adger & Schilling-Estes (2003) (see Appendix H). There were 11 clearly identifiable AAE grammatical types across samples. All of these grammatical features, with the exception of “existential it” and the “appositive,” overlap with features associated with MAE language impairment. The types of grammatical features found in the narratives are listed in descending order of frequency in Table 12. Table 12: Most Frequently Used Grammatical Pattern Types listed in Descending Order Number Grammatical Type Percentage Used 1 Subject/Verb Agreement 83 2 0 Regular Past 67 3 Existential It 50 4 0 Copula 50 5 0 Preposition 50 6 Appositive 33 7 0 Possessive 33 8 0 Regular Plural 33 9 Multiple Negation 33 10 Undifferentiated Pronoun 33 11 0 Article 17 The total number of tokens of AAE grammatical features in the narrative samples was much lower than that of the phonological features. This is due to the difference in opportunity per sentence for each type of feature. The number of AAE grammatical 141
tokens used by the typically developing children was 9 to 31 with a mean of 17.3 grammatical tokens. The average number of AAE grammatical tokens used by the low dialect density AAE speaking/typically developing children was 10.5 tokens (Child 2 and Child 3). The one high-density AAE speaking/typically developing child (Child 1) used a total of 31 tokens. The range of AAE grammatical tokens used by the children with language impairment was from 7 to 22. The number of AAE grammatical tokens used by the lowdensity language-impaired child (Child 5) was 7 tokens. The number of AAE grammatical tokens used by high-density dialect AAE speaking/language impaired children (Child 4 and Child 6) ranged from 20 to 22, with a mean of 21 tokens. A summary of the types and tokens of AAE grammatical features and the total number of types used by each child can be found in Appendix I. Total Dialect Density Measurements The total mean DDM for all children, regardless of language development group, is .40. Using this mean, Child 1 is classified as a high-density AAE speaker overall, along with Child 4 and Child 6, which match their DELV-ST classifications as having a “strong variation from MAE.” Child 2 and Child 3 are classified as low-density AAE speakers, also matching their DELV-ST classifications as being “MAE speakers.” However, Child 5 is classified as a low-density AAE speaker, which contradicts his DELV-ST classification as having a “strong variation from MAE.” This is most likely due to the fact that Child 5 was recounting a storybook written in MAE since he relied heavily on the phonological and grammatical structures in the original story because of his own difficulties in creating narrative structures without support.
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Table 13: Phonological, Grammatical, and Total Child DDMs Child Phonological Grammatical Total DDM DDM DDM 1 Low High High 2 Low Low Low 3 Low Low Low 4 High High High 5 High Low Low 6 High High High Table 13 demonstrates the levels of dialect density and total dialect densities for each child. All but two of the children’s DDMs are consistent across phonological and grammatical features. Child 1 and Child 5 have a combination of high and low DDMs. Despite Child 5’s use of an MAE text for retelling, the total DDMs of Child 1 and 5 are so close to the mean of .40 (.40 for Child 1 and .39 for Child 5), the difference between the two seems somewhat arbitrary. Table 13 demonstrates the combinations of dialect density measures according to classification labels. This section included analyses of the phonological and grammatical features of the child narratives. The narratives demonstrate that regardless of dialectal feature density or language ability, all of the children used some AAE features at least once. For example, consonant cluster reduction was highly used by all children and AAE subjectverb agreement was used by all but one child (Child 5). The children’s use of phonological and grammatical features varied considerably from child to child. The following section looks at analysis of the children’s language development levels according to SALT. SALT Analysis The Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts computer software (SALT) (Miller & Iglesias, 2006) was used to provide an objective measure of language
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development as demonstrated in the child narratives as opposed to the children’s performances on the standardized DELV-NR test. This was a crucial step in portraying the children’s language development status because they might have presented differently in an open-ended narrative than on the standardized test. It was important to know details of the narrative performances since that is what the SLTs were actually viewing. I transcribed the children’s narratives, first transferring the standard orthography transcription of the narratives into the language sample analysis software according to SALT instructions. However, in coding the syntax of the AAE children in this study, AAE grammatical rules were left unmarked productions rather than deviations from the standard MAE coding rules used by SALT. This was done to avoid having many AAE features considered language impairment features. SALT “Standard Measure” analyses were conducted to compare the narratives to those of age-peers from the Wisconsin narrative database. The standard measure analyses include: number of utterances, mean length of utterance, number of root words used, and total number of words, among others. The age range of the Wisconsin database children was 6 months below to 6 months above the age of each of the six children in this study. The narratives were also matched to the Wisconsin database by number of utterances. The number of children used in the comparison groups from the Wisconsin database varied according to the child’s age and number of utterances per narrative. The number of children in each comparison group ranged from 27 for the two 4 year-old children, to 83 for the children 5 years and older. SALT databases do not categorize children by ethnicity. However, it is unlikely that the SALT Wisconsin narrative database
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participants were all African Americans, given the majority White ethnic composition of that state. The mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) is a rough estimate of syntactic language development, particularly in children 5 years or younger. Most of the children’s mean lengths of utterance in words (MLUw) were within one standard deviation (SD) of those in the Wisconsin narrative database. The exception was Child 2, whose MLUw was 1.3 SD above the mean (8.88 vs. 6.61). The number of different word roots in a language sample is considered a measure of semantic language development. Four children (Child 3 through Child 6) had numbers within 1 SD above or below the mean. Child 1, however, had a score that was 1.5 SD below the mean, while Child 2 had a score that was 3 SD above the mean. There were no SALT narrative sample measures that looked at pragmatic language development. SALT intelligibility figures were based on the number of completely intelligible utterances in the narratives. All of the typically developing children had within average intelligibility scores, all above the norming sample by less than 1 SD. The LI children’s scores were variable according to age. The youngest two children had the lowest intelligibility. Child 4’s score was over 2 SD below the mean and Child 5’s score was almost 4 SD below the mean. Comparison of DELV-NR Scores and SALT Analyses It is important to point out the different nature of the DELV and SALT analysis and the type of language they sample. The DELV is a standardized measure of language comprehension and production in which children respond to test items, whereas SALT
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language analysis looks at narratives, most of which are monologues, and bases its scores on language production alone. Most of the answers in the DELV consist of one word or phrases for language production and many are comprehension items to which children only point. The DELV domain scores are standardized on 900 children nationwide while the SALT comparison corpuses used were considerably smaller, ranging from 27 to 83 children from Wisconsin only. Equally important is the fact the SALT scores are based on only one measure within each domain of language, where syntax is only measured by MLUw, semantics is only measured by number of different word roots, and speech production is only measured by overall intelligibility. That said, however, the DELV-NR and SALT measures demonstrate similar language ability scores for the six children in this study. This is particularly true for the TD children, the only exception of which is Child 2, whose demonstration of semantic ability in narrative discourse is 3 SDs above the mean. With regard to the LI children, there is more dissimilarity between the two measures’ scores, especially in the area of syntax (Child 4 and Child 5) and with regard to speech production (Child 6). All domains of language are more taxed by discourse, especially narrative discourse, than by oneword responses. It makes sense that syntax and intelligibility would be most affected by narrative production than by one-word utterances. Summary: Dialectal Variation of Child Participants Three of the participants included in this study demonstrated low-density AAE in their narrative samples and 3 demonstrated high-density AAE. These dialect density measures were a combination of AAE phonological and grammatical features. Two of the participants had a mixture of low- and high-density feature scores and the resulting total
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DDM for one child (Child 5) indicated less use of AAE dialectal features than did his DELV-ST “language variation status” scores. All of the other children’s narrative DDM scores matched their DELV-ST scores. While using the DELV-ST scores created an empty cell in the language variation by language development matrix, the narrative sample DDMs provided at least one child subject per cell. The SALT narrative measures were less congruent with the DELV-NR scores for the children with language impairments. Child 4 and 5 had better SALT scores in the area of syntax than they did on the DELV-NR. Child 6’s intelligibility was far worse on the narrative sample than her average phonology score on the DELV-NR would predict. III.
SLT Questionnaire Results This section contains the results of measures used with the SLTs, including the
survey questionnaire on language diversity. Survey Questionnaire The survey questionnaire was distributed to 52 SLTs in the targeted school district who served early intervention, preschool, elementary, and high school students. Twentyfour SLTs returned completed questionnaires, for a response rate of 46%. Of those 24 SLTs, 9 were not American citizens and had only recently come to the United States. Those SLTs were excluded from this study, which focuses on American language attitudes and assessment practices. This section summarizes the responses on the 15 remaining survey questionnaires. The analysis of this data considers the question of whether SLTs are satisfied with their multicultural assessment training at the university level, whether the level of discussion regarding multicultural assessment has changed
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over the last 30 years, and what methods of continuing education in the area of multicultural assessment the SLTs are finding to be most useful. SLT Demographics Most SLTs had worked for the school district for 10 years or more. Most of the SLTs were full-time employees, one worked more than full-time, and 1 worked less than one-quarter-time. Eight of the SLTs worked with elementary and secondary school students, and 7 SLTs worked with the preschool population. All survey respondents had bachelor’s degrees, 87% had master’s degrees, and 40% had clinical rehabilitation credentials, or both. One SLT had a classroom authorization credential. Most of the SLTs had bachelor’s degrees in communicative disorders and some, depending on what state they graduated in, were able to work as SLTs with their bachelor’s degrees alone. California SLTs are required to have either a master’s degree or a clinical rehabilitation credential to work in the schools. Seven of the SLTs were from California, 2 from other Western states, 1 from the Southwest, and 4 from the Midwest or East Coast. One of the SLTs was born in Central America and raised in the United States from the age of 9. The SLTs were exposed to many different dialects and languages as children, including AAE, MAE, Spanish, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Icelandic, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Significantly, two SLTs were exposed to AAE in their childhood homes or communities and three said they had been exposed to AAE in their school years. Most SLTs said they were proficient only in MAE. One SLT was fluent in AAE, one in Spanish, and another was proficient in American Sign Language.
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Approximately half of the SLTs had graduated with their master’s degrees or clinical rehabilitation credential between 1 to 20 years at the time of the study and half had graduated between 21 and 25 years before. Table 14 summarizes these findings. Table 14: Speech-Language Therapist Sample Demographics Percentage of SLT Sample Years since Graduation 33% 1-6 13% 10-20 27% 21-25 20% 26-35 Caseload Demographics The majority of the survey respondents had caseload sizes between 61 and 80 children and one-third of the respondents had caseloads of between 21 and 40 children. Table 15 summarizes these findings. Table 15: Speech-Language Therapist Caseload Size Percentage of SLT Sample 7% 7% 33% 27% 20%
Caseload Size
