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Part of
Understanding Deafness, Language and Cognitive Development: Essays in honour of Bencie Woll
Edited by Gary Morgan
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 25] 2020
► pp. 53–72

Chapter 4
The assessment of signed languages

Despite the large number of assessments available to measure spoken language acquisition, until relatively recently no assessments were available that could be used to evaluate deaf children’s sign language acquisition. This is despite the fact that sign language has been used with deaf children in educational contexts for many years, and that deaf children are widely acknowledged to be at risk for language development. However, development of sign language assessments presents unique methodological challenges, due to factors such as our relatively limited knowledge of language acquisition in sign, and also to the nature and size of the Deaf community – the latter presenting specific challenges when standardising measures. This chapter will present two current areas of research related to sign language assessment, drawing on expertise from the UK, USA and Germany.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The first published assessments of sign language acquisition
  • Methodological issues in web-based sign language assessment for deaf students
  • Dynamic assessment
  • Assessment of signers who have intellectual disabilities
  • Assessment of adult learners of a sign language
  • Overall conclusions
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 26 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.25.04her
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