Philip Combiths, assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a CSSI researcher affiliate, is developing a toolkit to give educators and speech-language pathologists a better picture of multilingual children’s language abilities. Assessing a potential communication disorder among multilingual preschoolers can be challenging because standardized assessment tools focus on English, even when a child speaks another language at home.

“These assessments are the gatekeeper for who gets the services that they need to have a chance to be at the level of their peers,” says Combiths.

To get this critical work off the ground, Combiths was selected for last spring’s CSSI Grant Writing Residency Program. The program offers dedicated time and space to write a grant proposal while providing expert feedback and assistance with the submission process. 

Over the course of the semester, Combiths spent one day a week in residence at CSSI writing his grant proposal, “IMPACT: A Research-Practice Partnership to Develop and Evaluate the Integrated Multilingual Preschool Assessment in Context Toolkit.” 

“I learned so much about grantsmanship through that process, drawing on the decades of experience these folks have. Also, for an entire day, I was not in my typical building. It carved out time for this work, and I would not be where I am without it.”

He recently submitted his RO1 grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Development.

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Building a fuller picture of language ability 

Combiths says multilingual learners sometimes face a “wait-and-see" response that delays language evaluation as they develop their English language skills. 

“That is really problematic because getting language support in preschool, before you get to kindergarten, can be incredibly impactful for that child’s trajectory,” he says. 

Teachers need a better option than simply comparing their progress with that of their monolingual peers.

“Imagine being a teacher in a classroom. You have a multilingual learner coming in at age 3 who is struggling to communicate with others. The inherent question is always going to be, ‘Is this a typical child who is still learning English? Or is it something else?’” 

The Integrated Multilingual Preschool Assessment in Context Toolkit (IMPACT) aims to help pre-K programs better gather the information they need to identify children who need language support from a speech-language pathologist, no matter how many languages they speak. It gathers input from multiple facets of a child’s language environment, including language histories from parents and teachers, and home and school language assessments. 

Combiths is also exploring ways to evaluate children’s learning capacity that aren’t specific to any language and could be applied to anyone. For example, children are assessed on their ability to repeat made-up words presented to them to measure some of the cognitive skills we use to learn words. 

His proposal is now under review and, if funded, would begin in July 2027.

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