This study aims to ascertain whether a shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment influences the narratives produced by the children. Participants were 20 typically developing (TD) children and 10 children with language impairment (LI), aged 6 to 8 years. They were randomly assigned to two groups and assessed with two different presentation methods. Narrative performance was measured in terms of micro-and macrostructure. Microstructural variables included productivity (total number of words, total number of T-units), syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit) and lexical diversity measures (total number of different words, number of internal state terms). Macrostructural variables included cohesion measures (number of complete, incomplete and error ties) and story structure scores measured by the Afrikaans translation (Klop, Visser and Oosthuizen 2012a) of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives © (LITMUS-MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012). Both presentation methods elicited narratives of similar quality in terms of the micro-and macrostructural variables in all the groups. A shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment therefore did not influence the narratives produced by children with LI and TD children.

South Africa is a country marked by cultural and linguistic diversity with 11 official languages. The majority of school children do not receive their formal schooling in their home language. There is a need for language assessment tools in education and rehabilitation contexts to distinguish between children with language learning problems and/or SLI, and language delay as a result of limited exposure to the language of learning. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) provides clinicians and researchers with an appropriate and culturally relevant tool to assess bilingual children in both languages. So far MAIN has been widely used in Afrikaans- English bilingual children. However, translating and adapting MAIN to our other nine official languages to achieve functional and cultural equivalence is more challenging.

Speech-language therapists (SLTs) in South Africa are increasingly considering alternative models of service delivery to children at risk for language and literacy development delays. A transprofessional model of collaboration allows SLTs and teachers to share responsibility for primary prevention of literacy difficulties. Previous research has identified several challenges with regard to effective collaboration between qualified professionals, indicating that specific opportunities need to be created for professionals to ‘cross over disciplinary lines’ to gain more insight into a profession other than their own. Student training presents a valuable opportunity for role-exchange between pre-professional SLTs and teachers. The article describes the experiences of teachers, undergraduate SLT students and tutors with regard to transdisciplinary collaboration in the foundation-phase classroom, according to the ‘embedded-explicit’ model. The authors argue that a more in-depth understanding of the different role-players’ perceptions of transdisciplinary collaboration will contribute to enhanced collaboration between SLTs and teachers.