Investigating practitioners’ perceived self- confidence and practices for multilingual children with developmental language disorder: The case of Sweden

The aim of the present study is twofold: to explore the assessment and
intervention practices of Swedish practitioners (mainly Speech and Language
Therapists: SLTs) for multilingual children with Developmental Language
Disorders (DLD) and to explore to which extent they perceive themselves as
confident with respect to assessment and intervention. The data comes from
the Swedish part of the survey by the European research network (COST1406),
including data from 35 countries. In total, 101 practitioners in Sweden
answered an online survey. Most of the respondents were female, had a
master’s degree, Swedish as their first language (L1), and used only one
language in their professional role. All the practitioners answered the first
section, 45 of whom also answered questions regarding which languages they
use in assessment and intervention with multilingual children. A majority of the
participants reported that they encourage parents to use the minority language
when communicating with their child at home. The results indicate a context
specific DLD intervention approach in which Swedish practitioners tend to
emphasize the importance of native language-usage at home. However, due to
the amount of missing data, methodological issues need to be taken into
consideration.