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The CELF-5 Assessment & Assessing Bilingual Children
Are you familiar with the CELF-5 Assessment?
The CELF-5 is widely used by clinicians to test receptive and expressive aspects of language. The CELF-5 includes multiple ‘subtests,’ and is used for children ages 5-21. The Subtests include Sentence Comprehension, Linguistic Concepts, Word Structure, Word Classes, Following Directions, Formulated Sentences, Recalling Sentences, and Understanding Spoken Paragraphs. Each of these categories provides insight into the expressive and receptive language abilities of a child being assessed for language disorders and/or difficulty. One of the challenges and limitations of this assessment includes obtaining an accurate reading of a bilingual or trilingual child due to the fact that the CELF-5 was ‘normed’ on monolingual English-speakers. This means that the test was given to monolingual English speakers, and therefore it will provide a more accurate reading on a monolingual English speaker’s language skills than on a bilingual speakers’ language skills. Due to this fact, when a clinician is scoring this assessment that was given to a bilingual child, the scores are reported “informally” to give a broad picture of where the child is language-wise. For clinicians, “Standard scores are not reported when an assessment has been translated across languages or used with a population it was not intended for; instead, provide a narrative description of performance” (Pluskota et al., 2023). This is a very confounding variable for working with and assessing bilingual clients, and there are resources for SLPs to address this. Please feel free to review the article below for further insight into this aspect of the speech field.
Reference
Girolamo, T., Ghali, S., Campos, I., & Ford, A. (2022). Interpretation and Use of Standardized
Language Assessments for Diverse School-Age Individuals. Perspectives of the ASHA special interest groups, 7(4), 981–994. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_persp-21-00322
Pluskota, A. & Mabry Price, LR (2023). Answers to Your FAQs About Multilingual Assessment.
The ASHA Leader Live. https://leader.pubs.asha.org/do/10.1044/leader.FAQ.2809 2023.slp-slpa-faq.6/full/
