ABSTRACT
The assessment of the full range of language skills of deaf children is a complex task due to the varied forms and modalities of language used by many deaf children. In this chapter, we discuss the development of a measure to assess the language proficiency of deaf children. The basic premise for the development of the measure was that any scale that is identified with a single means of expression, such as spoken English or signed skills, necessarily underestimates the deaf child's full range of language skills. Therefore, as becomes apparent in subsequent sections of the chapter, the focus for our scale was less on the form of the child's language and more on the content and use components of language skills (Bloom & Lahey, 1978).
