The Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit is a language assessment battery for primary school-aged children available in Abidji, Attié, Baoulé, and Bété languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. The Toolkit measures phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness.
There are over 60 languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, while the official language is French. Most children attend school in French, a language they may not speak at home and in the community. This is particularly true in rural regions where most children are bilingual in a local language and in French, and many only learn French when starting school. Language assessments conducted in French only measure a bilingual child’s language skills in one of their two languages, often their non-native language. Language assessments in a child’s native language (rather than in French) are not available. Our research team developed the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit to fill this critical gap.
To date, we have administered the Toolkit to over 2,000 primary-school children in the Adzope, Sikensi, Thiebissou, and Soubre regions of Côte d’Ivoire. Forthcoming publications from our lab report our findings and psychometric measures for the Toolkit. Our goal is to build a larger dataset that would generate test norms.
A copy of the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit is freely available to researchers. The Toolkit includes an instruction manual and assessment forms (in French). If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Kaja Jasińska.