As the number of bilingual children worldwide grows, more and more Speech and Language therapists are requested to assess children who speak more than one language. The population of bilingual children differs from the population of monolingual children, so, in order to properly identify Developmental Language Disorder , the SLTs need to possess sufficient knowledge on the disorder and have some basic experience on bilingualism. Due to a scarce amount of literature on the diagnosis of DLD in bilingual children available in Slovene and courses on bilingualism not being included in the Speech and Language Therapy’s curriculum, SLTs gain little information on the assessment of bilingual children with suspected DLD. The ability of SLTs to assess bilingual children is questioned and therefore, it is of key importance to provide resources to help them assess bilingual children. For that purposes, we researched SLTs’ current practices and their needs for some helpful guidelines for dealing with bilingual children with suspected DLD to be created. In the theoretical part of our dissertation, we defined the terms bilingualism and developmental language disorder. Furthermore, we described the procedure of diagnosing DLD in bilingual children in more detail and presented different instruments and questionnaires, intended primarily for the bilingual population, which can be helpful to Slovenian SLTs when diagnosing the disorder. We designed a questionnaire that was filled out by 70 SLTs who had included bilingual children in their caseloads or had experience working with bilingual children. With our research, we wanted to identify the current practices of SLTs for bilingual language assessment and compare them with the international guidelines. Furthermore, we wanted to know whether the SLTs were familiar with the diagnostic materials available in Slovene and are appropriate for usage with bilingual children. We also wanted to find out if the SLTs felt competent for carrying out the diagnosis of DLD and whether they felt the need to develop new guidelines offering accurate, evidence-based information on the diagnosis of bilingual children. The statistical analysis of the obtained data points out that the vast majority of SLTs does not feel competent to perform DLD diagnostics. Moreover, everyone addressed the need to have access to the guidelines that could help dealing with bilingual children. Drawing from all the gathered information, we can conclude that the current practices of SLTs are not in compliance with the international theoretical recommendations. Furthermore, most of the SLTs are not familiar with the questionnaires and the instruments suitable for recognizing DLD in bilingual children available in Slovene. Based on the obtained data, we conclude that there exists an enormous need for the development of some guidelines. The guidelines were made based on theoretical and practical findings. They combine all the current information on diagnostic processes of bilingual children with DLD. Their main purpose is to empower Slovenian SLT and offer them a framework for working with bilingual children.
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