Using MAIN in South Africa

Abstract


 
 
 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.
 
 

Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: Recent developments and new language adaptations

“…Cultural equivalence refers to aspects of content validity and cultural appropriateness of an instrument to ensure cross-cultural understanding of the pictorial and linguistic content. For example, recent additions to the available MAIN picture stimuli, such as adjusting the boy's skin colour (Cat and Dog stories) and replacing the sausages in the boy's bag with chicken legs (Dog story) may have improved the cultural appropriateness of MAIN in the South African context (Klop & Visser, 2020). Functional equivalence would, for instance, require measures to ensure that the isiZulu MAIN elicits constructs such as internal state terms in the same way as the English version.…”

“…It has standardized procedures for narrative elicitation and scoring. MAIN has mainly been used to elicit oral narratives, but it could also be used to test written production and comprehension of narratives (e.g., Amora et al, 2020;Klop & Visser, 2020;Kan et al, 2020;Otwinowska et al, 2022). The materials consist of four picture-based stories (Baby Goats, Baby Birds, Cat, and Dog), each in the form of a sequence of six pictures intended to elicit narratives and to assess both their production and comprehension.…”

The Adaptation of MAIN to Luganda

“…It has standardized procedures for narrative elicitation and scoring. MAIN has mainly been used to elicit oral narratives, but it could also be used to test written production and comprehension of narratives (e.g., Pesco & Bird, 2016;Lindgren, 2019;Amora et al, 2020;Mieszkowska et al, 2020;Kapalková et al, 2020;Klop & Visser, 2020;Kan et al, 2020;Otwinowska et al, 2022). The materials consist of four picture-based stories (Baby Goats, Baby Birds, Cat, and Dog), each in the form of a sequence of six pictures intended to elicit narratives and to assess both their production and comprehension.…”