Lexical skills in bilingual Maltese children : face-to-face versus online testing mode

Abstract

The assessment of children’s speech and language faces new and unique challenges brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdowns, the urgent need for remote assessments highlighted implementation obstacles, such as testing validity and reliability, that have persisted due to structural changes in our everyday lives. Remote learning and assessment have remained an integral part of global practices in various disciplines. Pre-2020, there was little research on how assessment tools could be reliably adapted to online formats (Burchell et.al., 2022). As such, this study investigates the reliability of remote assessment of lexical skills when compared to the traditional face-to-face assessment mode in bilingual Maltese children. Twenty-four-typically-developing 5.06-6.06-year-old Maltese-English speaking children were recruited as participants. The children’s receptive and expressive lexical skills across both the Maltese and English language were assessed by using receptive picture name judgement and picture naming tasks. The children sat for both in-person and remote assessments during separate sessions that utilized the same lexical tasks. The study also examined the concurrent validity of these lexical tasks through the use of a different set of lexical tasks that assessed similar skills. Results show similar scores across the different testing platforms in both language versions of the lexical tasks, implying the possible interchangeable nature of face-to-face and remote data collection for lexical skill assessment.