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.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.