Building an Assessment Use Argument for sign language: the BSL Nonsense Sign Repetition Test

Abstract

In this article, we adapt a concept designed to structure language testing more effectively, the Assessment Use Argument (AUA), as a framework for the development and/or use of sign language assessments for deaf children who are taught in a sign bilingual education setting. By drawing on data from a recent investigation of deaf children's nonsense sign repetition skills in British Sign Language, we demonstrate the steps of implementing the AUA in practical test design, development and use. This approach provides us with a framework which clearly states the competing values and which stakeholders hold these values. As such, it offers a useful foundation for test-designers, as well as for practitioners in sign bilingual education, for the interpretation of test scores and the consequences of their use.

Keywords:

• assessment
• sign bilingualism
• phonology
• non-word repetition
• deaf education

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain (Grant RES-620-28-6001), Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL), a City University Research Fellowship awarded to Wolfgang Mann and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship awarded to Chloë Marshall. The authors would like to thank all the children and teachers who took part and supported the research. Finally, the authors would like to thank Ruth Swanwick and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

1. Our use of deaf with a lowercase (d) includes children with a hearing loss as well as members of the community that use BSL.

2. Throughout this paper, we are referring to Swanwick and Gregory (2007) who define sign bilingualism as an: ‘approach to the education of deaf children which includes sign language as means of instruction and communication’ (9).

3. In the context of this paper, we make a distinction between test-users and test-takers. The first group includes test administrators and practitioners, the second group includes test participants.

4. Our purpose of using nonsense signs is that the child has never encountered these forms before. As a result, the task taps into the child's productive phonology and PWM, unconfounded by stored lexical knowledge.

5. For example, to generate lists for assessment of vocabulary in BSL, practitioners may adapt selected items from well-established tests, including the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT4FA; Dunn and Dunn 2007) or the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT-2000; Brownell 2000).

6. We use the term deaf native signer to refer to a deaf individual with deaf parents, who has acquired sign language from birth.

7. We present the AUA in a slightly more lay and less technical form to make it more suitable for a wider practitioner audience. Those readers interested in more specific details are referred to Bachman (2005).

8. We follow the convention of naming handshapes after the letters they represent in the American Sign Language manual alphabet or the numbers they represent in the counting system.

9. This test assesses the comprehension of selected aspects of BSL morphology and syntax (e.g. negation, number and distribution, verb morphology, and the distinction between nouns and verbs) in a picture-pointing paradigm.

10. Bachman points out that there may always be the possibility, at least in theory, that adding one more assessment will provide more complete information about the ability of interest (Bachman 2005, 19). This is even more so the case with regard to the assessment of sign language skills in deaf children about which we still have a fairly limited understanding.