SASL Newsletter - Fall 2019 Issue Issue 15 - Fall 2019

The Power of ASL
A Society Supporting Language, Literacy, and
Performing Arts in the Signed Modality
Fall 2019
A Newsletter of the Society for American Sign Language
Issue 15
Tools for Assessing
American Sign Language Acquisition
By Charlotte Enns
There are few standardized, norm-referenced assessment instruments to measure the
acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) skills in children, and this gap impacts research and
educational programming for young deaf children. In comparison, standardized assessment measures
of English speech and language skills are extremely numerous and are constantly being revised and
updated (Owens, 2016). In the past, the assessment of ASL abilities in deaf children was generally not
considered necessary because these abilities were deemed unrelated to their academic programming.
There was no recognition of ASL as a language, so ASL assessments were either not done at all or
done informally (Hoffmeister, Kuntze, & Fish, 2013). As educational programming shifted to
incorporate a cultural perspective of deaf people and bilingual approaches in the 1980s, more
emphasis was placed on assessing and monitoring children’s ASL skills. However, the development of
ASL abilities was seen primarily as a way of enhancing spoken and written English skills. For this
reason, formal assessments typically consisted of simply adapting existing spoken English tests by
administering them in ASL. Using translated tests is problematic because they are not developed for
deaf children or signed languages, the norms based on spoken languages do not apply to signed
languages, and often translated tests may not be assessing the same things in another language
(Woll, 2016). In general, the results of these translated assessments were not accurate and often did
not focus on relevant or appropriate structures of ASL.
Fortunately, there is increased research interest to create tests specifically developed and
designed to assess ASL and fit with the visual learning needs of deaf children. Several different tests
are often needed to provide a complete picture of a child’s ASL abilities. Here, I describe and compare
two such tests that measure different aspects of ASL acquisition: 1) ASL Receptive Skills Test (Enns,
Zimmer, Boudreault, Rabu, & Broszeit, 2013), and 2) ASL Proficiency Assessment (Maller, Singleton,
Supalla, & Wix, 1999).
ASL Receptive Skills Test
Purpose. The ASL Receptive Skills Test (ASL-RST) was adapted from the British Sign
________
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The Power of ASL
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Fall 2019 – Issue 15