Language assessment in South African languages
نویسنده
چکیده
The provision of effective services to patients from diverse linguistic backgrounds is a big challenge within the South African healthcare system (Mosdell, Balchin & Ameen, 2010; Pascoe & Norman, 2011; Van Dulm & Southwood, 2014). Almost 20 years after becoming an officially multilingual country, the provision of speech-language therapist (SLT) services to a linguistically diverse population remains problematic. The majority of SLT professionals speak English or Afrikaans (or both) and have little or no knowledge of the official African languages (Bornman, Sevcik, Romski & Pae, 2010; Gerber, 2009; Van Dulm & Southwood, 2014). This is a particularly grave concern, given the fact that in SLT services ‘language’ is not only used as a means of communication, but is the reason why a person is seeking help.
منابع مشابه
The Impact of the Students’ Formative and Summative Assessment on Professional Development of Iranian EFL Instructors at Universities: Case of Islamic Azad University-South Tehran Branch-Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages
This study was conducted to examine the impact of formative and summative assessment in the professional development of Iranian EFL Instructors at universities. Moreover, an attempt was made to figure out whether the formative assessment is more effective than the summative assessment. Since the present work is qualitative/quantitative research in nature, it was conducted within the ethnography...
متن کاملThe challenge of linguistic and cultural diversity: Does length of experience affect South African speech-language therapists’ management of children with language impairment?
BACKGROUND South African speech-language therapists (SLTs) currently do not reflect the country's linguistic and cultural diversity. The question arises as to who might be better equipped currently to provide services to multilingual populations: SLTs with more clinical experience in such contexts, or recently trained SLTs who are themselves linguistically and culturally diverse and whose train...
متن کاملIdentifying phonological processing deficits in Northern Sotho-speaking children: The use of non-word repetition as a language assessment tool in the South African context
Diagnostic testing of speech/language skills in the African languages spoken in South Africa is a challenging task, as standardised language tests in the official languages of South Africa barely exist. Commercially available language tests are in English, and have been standardised in other parts of the world. Such tests are often translated into African languages, a practice that speech langu...
متن کاملEffect of Holistic vs. Analytic Assessment on Improving Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Writing Skill
In assessing foreign language writing, holistic and analytic scoring can be used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. This study aimed to investigate the possible significant effect of analyt- ic and holistic assessments on improving writing skill among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, two groups of intermediate EFL learners, after being homogenized, were divided in...
متن کاملSpeech-language therapy for adolescents with written-language difficulties: the South African context.
OBJECTIVE To investigate whether privately practising speech-language therapists in South Africa are fulfilling their role of identification, assessment and intervention for adolescents with written-language and reading difficulties. Further needs concerning training with regard to this population group were also determined. METHOD A survey study was conducted, using a self-administered quest...
متن کامل