"Try your best": parent behaviors during administration of an online language assessment tool for bilingual Mandarin-English children

Abstract

The world is becoming increasingly multilingual. In the U.S., despite rapid growth in linguistic diversity, there is a complete lack of multilingual language assessment tools and a severe shortage of multilingual clinicians to detect language impairments among children who speak minority languages. To develop accessible child language assessment tools, we designed MECO-LAB, a web-based bilingual Mandarin-English assessment that uses parents as one of the potential groups of test administrators. We analyzed 16 videos of child-parent dyads and found that with minimal instructions, the majority (11 out of 16) of parents were capable of administering MECO-LAB to their children. We identified 296 interference and 381 support behaviors from parents that are influenced by linguistic, cognitive, emotional, and technical factors that researchers should consider when designing online language assessments. We proposed design recommendations for supporting child-parent interactions in similar applications that enable parents to administer online bilingual language assessments to their children.