This paper reports work in progress to develop an assessment procedure for expressive
language, to be used with children living in the Rochdale area of the UK and
speaking Mirpuri, Punjabi and/or Urdu. The assessment materials and procedure are
described, together with the principles for scoring. Normative data is currently
being collected. Children tested so far have demonstrated the need to allow for
code-switching and lexical borrowing and that attention to
‘literal’ translation of the target language is required.
Discrepancies between reported and actual languages used are also noted. Expressive
language appears unexpectedly sparse in some cases. Possible reasons for this are
discussed. This research has highlighted many difficulties in attempting to
construct an assessment of this kind.
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