Doing the right thing

I belong to a Facebook group SLPs for Evidence Based Practice. There is frequent discussion of what works and what doesn’t in intervention and in assessment. My work has often focused on assessment and assessment practices. And, I have to say that it is frustrating to find that something does (or doesn’t) work but that clinical practices take so long to change. So, I wonder what is our obligation in the field to be aware of the evidence? And what is our obligation to make changes in our practices?

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Combining Tests Results across 2 Languages

We have been working on the question of how to best identify language impairment in bilinguals for a long time. One guideline that has been around for a long time is to test in both languages. In workshops and in presentations I often will repeat TEST IN BOTH LANGUAGES, test in both languages… But, how should results from two languages be combined?

Test Development, Item Bias, and the BESA

A couple of people have asked me whether the BESA can work with children in the Eastern US. Yes, I know I’m in Texas and the kids we see here are mainly speakers of Mexican Spanish. But, that doesn’t mean we didn’t collect data from kids in other parts of the country. Or that we didn’t collect data on kids who speak different dialects of Spanish. We collected data mainly in three places: California, Texas, and Pennsylvania. We also had data contributed from other places including Georgia, Utah and New Jersey. What was most important was that we included children who used conservative dialects of Spanish and radical dialects of Spanish. Also, for English speakers, we considered what dialect or variety of English they were learning including: Texas English, California English, African American English, general American English and so on. Why does this matter?

Testing bilinguals in English: Do we get any useful information?

I think the title says it all, and it’s an important question. There’s no doubt that the best way to determine if a child has a language impairment is to test them in their language. For bilinguals, that usually means two languages– in the US context, their home language and English. But, there aren’t enough bilingual speech-language pathologists available nationally; and bilingual speech-language pathologists don’t speak every language represented by the clients in their area. So, one of the questions we’ve had is whether we can get any useful information from testing children who are bilingual in English only. The quick answer is yes, no, and it depends. The longer answer follows.