Evaluating language assessments with members of the travelling community.

Abstract

Background and objective: The Irish Travelling Community is a cultural group using a unique dialect – Traveller English. It has been established that some standardized, norm-referenced language measures are biased against culturally and linguistically diverse populations. In this study, the achievement of Traveller children on standardized language measures and on processing-dependent measures is compared with achievement of children from the Settled community on the same measures. Method: Twenty children aged 6–10 years, 10 each from Travelling and Settled communities, were assessed using the CELF-3 UK, and two processing-dependent measures to assess aspects of language development. Results and conclusions: Results indicate that Traveller children scored significantly lower than Settled children on the standardized language measures. In contrast, the use of processing-dependent measures showed few inter-group differences. The recommendation is that processing-dependent measures be used in addition to standardized measures to increase the validity of language assessment of Traveller children.