THE CLINICAL EVALUATION OF THE EXPRESSIVE SYNTAX OF BILINGUAL ENGLISH PRE-SCHOOLERS IN THE GREATER CAPE TOWN AREA: SUGGESTED MODIFICATIONS TO THE 1981 LARSP PROFILE

Introduction. The NEPI-report (1992:13) states that the national tendency of parents is to choose English as the medium of school instruction for their children. This tendency is very much present in the greater suburban area of Cape Town^'^ and particulary in the Cape Flats and District Six (McCormick 1989:149). In preparing their children for school, the parents in the Area usually try to raise their children in English from birth^. In some cases the parents are not mother tongue speakers of English, but of the local variety of Afrikaans. This results in second language English input being given to the children at home. According to McCormick (1993:66), the scenario of children acquiring English second language as their first language is thus not uncommon in the Area. The reader is referred to Appendix 1 for a brief discussion of the grammatical characteristics of the English spoken in the Area.

jjjjguistic varieties in their community, namely non-standard English and j^Qji-standard Afrikaans.School-going children may also hear standard gjjglish and/or standard Afrikaans.lack of appropriate language evaluation instruments for speakers of nofl-standard English.
Speech-language therapists are required to make a judgement about these children's language abilities.Referrals to speech-language therapists are frequently made by other professionals, for example paediatricians, who are concerned about the children's language.Reasons for their concern often include the children refusing to speak on the professional's request, backward language, or the children exhibiting language mixing of English and Afrikaans, which is seen as undesirable language behavior by the referring agent.It is the speech-language therapist's responsibility to determine whether the language development is delayed, the language is deviant, or whether the child's receptive and expressive language abilities are within normal limits in comparison to the nonstandard English and Afrikaans used in the child's linguistic environment.
There are no formal evaluation instruments which were devised especially for the evaluation of the syntax of these English-Afrikaans bilingual children.Commonly available formal instruments were devised for overseas (usually American or British) middle-class monolinguals, and should thus not be used for the evaluation of South African, working-class bilinguals on whom the instruments were not standardized.In order to form an opinion of the bilinguals' expressive syntactical abilities in English, South African speech-language therapists usually rely on the Lan-  That man is married with me, man.

Senl fi nces
Style Afr so al so Mean Sentence Length Mean No. Semcnces Per Turn http://spilplus.journals.ac.za Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure (=LARSP), devised by Crystal, Fletcher and Garman in 1976 and modified by these authors in 1981.It is an instrument used for analysing the spontaneous language samples of pre-school children, in order to make a differential diagnosis of the pre-schooler's expressive syntactical and morphological abilities.By analysing a sample according to the LARS?profile and plot-http://spilplus.journals.ac.za ting the exibited syntactical and morphological structures on the profUg.. the speech-language therapist can determine the language age of child, the pattern of syntactical use, as well as the nature of the language deviance (if any).A particularly useful feature of the LARSP profile is the error box, which is shown in Figure 1.Each of the structures or er-; rors in the box will be explained briefly.The reader is refered to (Crystal, Fletcher and Garman 1989) for a detailed account of the LARSP, including the error box.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The error box of the 1981 LARSP profile.Conn Clause Phrase Word and c s of time may futhermore precede those of place instead of the reverse which holds true for standard English.We're going tomorrow home.(Adv i) The adverb placement in these above-mentioned examples is equivalent to the Afrikaans translation of the sentences, Ek sal weer dit aansit and 0ns gaan more huis toe.16.Double negation may occur in District Six English.She don't want to write nowhere.(2xneg) The following characteristics are possibly unique to the English of preschoolers in the Area, thus not occuring in the English of older children and adults, therefore being developmental.17.The irregular past tense might not be used.In cases where it is not used, the children use the present tense plural verb form.He mos came and stand there in the passage, (irreg past->0) 18.The pre-schoolers often use ^ or and so instead of and then, to link ideas, especially during story-retelling.And so we came there.(+so) 19.^ is also often used by the pre-schoolers in the area, where speakers of standard South African English would use like this.My mommy must pick me M up.may be deleted in the English of the Area's pre-schoolers.Can you copy off by the other one he's doing?{Conn-*0) 33.The pronouns it and there may be deleted from the subject sister and my brother went to Durban.(Pron 35.Personal pronouns may also take the non-nominative form instead of the nominative form it would take in the standard language.Us is finished.(Pron=dative) 36.The absence of inversion of the auxiliary verb, the copula or the main verb, and the object.This occurs often, especially in object clauses and questions.I know where is the CNA.(Verb ' )