Enhancing inclusive Chinese language education for NCS children in Hong Kong : a dynamic assessment approach for triaging

Abstract

One big challenge when school-based speech therapists work with non-Chinese speaking (NCS) children who learn Chinese as their second language (L2) concerns the difficulty to distinguish if their poor language performances are solely attributed to limited language exposures due to multilingual (and cultural) acquisition, or that the problem is complicated by the comorbidity of language disorders of the concerned children. One possible solution is to estimate NCS children's potential to learn language through experience using dynamic assessments. Individuals with language disorders are expected to demonstrate low/no responsiveness to learn language through the given controlled experience. In this chapter, we applied the test-teach-retest paradigm to assess the awareness of compounding morphology of Chinese – the most productive word formation rule in Chinese – on fourteen NCS children in Hong Kong. The results indicated that a non-negative post-teaching gain was observed among thirteen of the participants distributed in both low- and high-grade levels. A significant positive correlation between grade levels and pre-teaching scores was also observed. We illustrate how the children's retest performances allowed the estimation of the likelihood that their low Chinese proficiencies are complicated by language disorders. Practical tips of language intervention planning for the NCS children are suggested.