JCPSLP November 2016

Creating sustainable services: Minority world SLPs in majority world contexts

Development of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment Ben Pha. m, Sharynne McLeod, and Xuan Thi Thanh Le

Vietnamese is the official language of over 92 million people in Viet Nam and nearly four million diaspora including in Australia, USA, and Canada. To date, there are no standardised speech assessments for Vietnamese children. This paper outlines the development of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment (VSA) through collaboration between researchers in Viet Nam and Australia. The VSA contains all Vietnamese consonants, vowels and tones in at least two words with different sequence constraints. Further, the VSA was developed to be within the vocabulary range of young children, frequently used by Vietnamese people in different regions, picturable, and either a noun or verb. Picture stimuli were identified and the test was piloted with Vietnamese speakers of different ages who spoke different Vietnamese dialects. A score sheet was designed to include acceptable dialectal pronunciations, and to enable calculation of percentage of consonants/vowels/ semivowels/tones correct and presence of phonological processes (patterns). The VSA is currently undergoing norming and standardisation. V ietnamese is the official language spoken by over 92 million people in Viet Nam and by nearly four million diaspora including in Australia, USA, and Canada. The government of Viet Nam has implemented “The Developmental Standards for Children aged 5”, and standard 15, item 65 is “to speak clearly” (The Viet Nam Ministry of Education and Training, 2010). Vietnamese professionals report they assess Vietnamese children’s speech production by using informal measures to determine who meets the developmental standards (The Viet Nam Institute of Educational Sciences, 2014). To date, there are no standardised norm-referenced assessments of Vietnamese children’s speech production (McLeod, 2012a; McLeod & Verdon, 2014), which has resulted in the creation of informal tools presented in book chapters,

journal articles, unpublished dissertations, and on websites (Cameron & Watt, 2006; Cheng, 1991; Hwa-Froelich, Hodson, & Edwards, 2002; Nguy ễ n, 2011; Nguy ễ n & Pha. m, 2014; Pham, 2009; Tang & Barlow, 2006; V ũ & Đ ặ ng, 2004), as well as tools developed by staff in a particular clinic/school/hospital/university for use in their own clinical practice (The Children’s Hospital No. 1, 2013; Ducote, n.d.; Lê, 2013; West, 2000). Many of these tools are created to assess children who speak the southern Vietnamese dialect in Viet Nam, or other countries, and have limitations when used with people who speak the northern and central dialects of Vietnamese. This situation necessitated the development of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment (VSA) for research and clinical practice across Viet Nam and in other countries. This paper outlines the creation of the VSA using psychometric standards for assessment in two stages: conceptualisation and operationalisation (Frytak, 2000) and has been written using the guidelines for test creation from McLeod (2012b). The VSA has been developed via collaboration between Ben Pha. m, Xuan Thi Thanh Le and Sharynne McLeod, the Trinh Foundation and Charles Sturt University in Viet Nam and Australia (see Figure 1). Creation of the VSA would not be possible without extensive international collaboration between authors in these majority- and minority-world contexts drawing on the authors’ expertise in Vietnamese phonetics and phonology, Vietnamese dialectal variants, child development, and test development. The authors met face-to-face on numerous occasions to listen to the production of consonants, vowels and tones by Vietnamese speakers, and to debate the benefits of different word choices. The three authors also undertook pilot testing and initial operationalisation of the tool together in Australia and Viet Nam, each transcribing, then discussing children’s production of the words. The VSA would not have the same level of rigour if the three authors had not collaborated and cooperated extensively during the conceptualisation stage. Stage 1. Conceptualisation of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment Conceptualisation of an assessment tool refers to determining its purpose and scope, ensuring it measures what it intends to do through its properties and features (Frytak, 2000). Conceptualisation of an assessment begins with a statement of its purpose, intended population, target skill, and scope (McLeod, 2012b).

KEYWORDS ASSESSMENT CHILDREN SPEECH VIETNAMESE

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Ben Pha. m (top), Sharynne McLeod (centre), and Xuan Thi Thanh Le

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JCPSLP Volume 18, Number 3 2016

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology