Tagalog adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: History, process and preliminary results

Kathleen Kay Amora,Rowena Garcia,Natalia Gagarina

doi:10.21248/zaspil.64.2020.577

Abstract

   This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines, specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS- MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language. Finally, the results of a pilot study conducted on Tagalog-English bilingual children and adults (N=27) are presented. The results showed that Story Structure is similar across the two languages and that it develops significantly with age.  

Highlights

This paper expounds the bilingual history of the Philippines as well as the processes involved in adapting the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings – Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN, hereafter MAIN; Gagarina et al, 2012, 2015, 2019) to Tagalog/Filipino
This study offers a cross-linguistic comparison between Tagalog and English using MAIN across the same set of participants of different age groups
This study describes the bilingualism status of the Philippines, where Tagalog and English are the official languages of the country

Summary

Introduction

This paper expounds the bilingual history of the Philippines as well as the processes involved in adapting the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings – Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN, hereafter MAIN; Gagarina et al, 2012, 2015, 2019) to Tagalog/Filipino. The Philippines is considered as one of the countries with a high number of distinct languages (ranked 25th out of 232 countries with a score of 0.842) in the recent Greenberg Linguistic Diversity Index with around 183 local languages (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2019a). Since the Philippines is a linguistically diverse country, it has two official languages - Filipino and English. This paper focuses on the use of Tagalog (basis of Filipino) and English in bilingual children and adults. A verb initial language with a distinct voice marking system, belongs to the MalayoPolynesian branch of the Austronesian linguistic family and has over 23 million native (L1) and second language (L2) speakers (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2019b; Schachter & Otanes, 1972)

Methods

Results

Conclusion