The development of the Singapore English Action Picture Test: an expressive language screening assessment for Chinese Singaporean preschool children

In multilingual societies such as Singapore, the assessment of children’s language skills is complicated by issues such as scarce information on the development of the local languages, insufficient culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment tools, and a lack of appropriate normative data for commercially available assessments with which to make a comparison between a child and their peers. The role of the speech and language therapist is to assess and provide remediation for language learning difficulties. Although Singapore Standard English (SSE) is the official language of education in Singapore, children commence school with a wide range of ability in and exposure to SSE and Singapore Colloquial English (SCE). Combined with the lack of information about the development of these forms of English, obtaining a clear picture of a child’s language abilities is complex and challenging for the clinician. In order to attempt to overcome some of these challenges, we adapted the Renfrew Action Picture Test to make it more culturally and linguistically appropriate for the assessment of preschool Chinese Singaporean children’s expressive language skills in the forms of English spoken in Singapore. This chapter outlines the process of the adaptation of the test and the standardisation of the tool for the multilingual Singapore population.