Solveig Chilla er professor i pedagogikk med særlig vekt på språk- og kommunikasjonsvansker ved Europa-Universität Flensburg. I forbindelse med et besøk ved HiØ holder hun en spennende gjesteforelesning i skjæringspunktet mellom språk, spesialpedagogikk og testing.
Solveig Chilla skriver følgende om gjesteforelesningen:
"Though Germany has long provided education for children speaking a heritage language, reliable assessment tools for diagnosis of language impairment or the progress in the acquisition of German by heritage language and refugee children are still lacking. The few tools explicitly targeting bilingual populations are normed for younger simultaneous or successive bilingual children. Educational and (psycho-)linguistic research on L1 and L2 acquisition in bilingual children sketches them as a group of language learners varying in many aspects. However, most studies to date have based evaluations of language proficiency or new assessment tools on data from heritage children, while studies on the appropriateness of assessment tools for school-age refugee children remain a notable exception. Considering the assessment of school-related language performance, bilingual refugees are at risk of misdiagnosis, along with the well-known effects of educational disadvantage. This particularly applies to children with low socioeconomic status (SES). Looking beyond oral language competencies and using test combinations can help exclude language disorders in school-age children with limited L2 proficiency.
In our workshop, we will first gain insights into the German support system for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in schools. Germany, in contrast to Norway, has a long tradition of separate schooling for children assessed with Special Needs, also in the field of language and communication.
We will further discuss recent findings on the use of so-called LITMUS tools (Language Impairment in Multilingual Setting, see Armon-Lotem et al. 2015) for the assessment of L2 children in Germany. These were devised to minimize the effects of factors related to bilingualism on task performance so that DLD can be reliably identified in bilingual contexts. Factors such as age and length of exposure to L2, L1-use/richness, as well as heritage language use and schooling challenge DLD assessment i schools. In the face of established diagnostic procedures and educational policies, the results suggest that standardized as well as experimental morpho-syntactic L2-tests have to be used with caution. During the workshop, we will discuss the findings considering heritage language speaking and with respect to language support in schools."
Forelesningen arrangeres i et samarbeid mellom Nasjonalt senter for engelsk og fremmedspråk i opplæringen og Institutt for pedagogikk, IKT og læring.