Language and Literacy Assessment for Identifying Specific Reading Difficulties among Multilingual Children in Sarawak

Lee, Julia Ai Cheng (2018) Language and Literacy Assessment for Identifying Specific Reading Difficulties among Multilingual Children in Sarawak. In: Second ConnectM conference, July 16th – 19th, 2018, University of Reading, Malaysia.

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Abstract

There is limited research on assessments for multilingual children who are at risk for reading difficulties in Malaysia. The goal of this paper is to present an overview of the challenges of developing a multi-componential language and literacy assessment in Malay and English for a multilingual community. The norms and language and literacy errors among the multilingual children were also derived and analysed, respectively. The participants (n = 866) in the study were Primary 1 children from 10 government schools in Sarawak. The findings on the language and literacy error patterns among the poor readers suggest that there is an imbalanced development between the students’ competence in Malay and English. Curriculum-based measurements may play an efficient role in assessment and intervention planning for a multilingual population with reading difficulties. This study shows that children in a multilingual setting should be assessed in their dominant academic language for identifying reading difficulties.

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