Multilingual assessment of early child development: Analyses from repeated observations of children in Kenya.

Heather A Knauer,Pamela Jakiela,Lia C.H Fernald,Patricia Kariger,Owen Ozier

doi:10.1111/desc.12875

Abstract

In many low‐ and middle‐income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a child's development, underscoring the importance of test translation and adaptation. To examine differences in vocabulary development by language of assessment, we adapted and validated instruments to measure developmental outcomes, including expressive and receptive vocabulary. We assessed 505 2‐to‐6‐year‐old children in rural communities in Western Kenya with comparable vocabulary tests in three languages: Luo (the local language or mother tongue), Swahili, and English (official languages) at two time points, 5–6 weeks apart, between September 2015 and October 2016. Younger children responded to the expressive vocabulary measure exclusively in Luo (44%–59% of 2‐to‐4‐year‐olds) much more frequently than did older children (20%–21% of 5‐to‐6‐year‐olds). Baseline receptive vocabulary scores in Luo (β = 0.26, SE = 0.05, p < 0.001) and Swahili (β = 0.10, SE = 0.05, p = 0.032) were strongly associated with receptive vocabulary in English at follow‐up, even after controlling for English vocabulary at baseline. Parental Luo literacy at baseline (β = 0.11, SE = 0.05, p = 0.045) was associated with child English vocabulary at follow‐up, while parental English literacy at baseline was not. Our findings suggest that multilingual testing is essential to understanding the developmental environment and cognitive growth of multilingual children.

Highlights

Up to 40% of children worldwide speak a mother tongue that is not used at school (Clegg & Simpson, 2016; Walter & Benson, 2012), which results in significant, negative consequences for hundreds of millions of children (Ball, 2011)
A country's policy regarding language of instruction (LOI) can have significant implications for children's development in ways that interact with poverty, parental literacy, ethnicity, and other risk factors faced by vul‐ nerable children as they move through the formal education system
We found that English receptive vocabulary was less strongly associated with other measures of children's language development than ex‐ pected, especially among the youngest children

Summary

Introduction

Up to 40% of children worldwide speak a mother tongue that is not used at school (Clegg & Simpson, 2016; Walter & Benson, 2012), which results in significant, negative consequences for hundreds of millions of children (Ball, 2011). Child development assessments allow teachers to understand how and what children are learning, to diagnose learning differences or lan‐ guage disorders, and to benchmark achievement against national or international standards (Armon‐Lotem, de Jong, & Meir, 2015; Snilsveit et al, 2016). Researchers and policymakers rely on child as‐ sessments to examine programme effectiveness In both academic and nonacademic settings, students are routinely tested in only one lan‐ guage, either the LOI or parents’ preferred language. It is challenging to assess child development, language disorders, and school readiness in such populations, both because these children develop linguistic skills in multiple languages simultaneously and because most widely used measures of child development have not been validated in local lan‐ guages and low‐ and middle‐income country (LMIC) contexts. To capture the linguistic development of children in LMIC contexts, it is crucial to adapt, or develop, and subsequently validate assessments in children's mother tongues (Prado et al, 2018)

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