I'm super excited to review another awesome Smarty Ears app today! This one is for your bilingual students. It's actually the Spanish/English bilingual version of Sunny Articulation Phonology Test. You can read a review of that app
HERE.
The
Bilingual Articulation Phonology Assessment (BAPA) is great for assessing the articulation and phonology skills of kids that speak Spanish-only or both English and Spanish.
When you enter the app, the "home" screen lists the students and assessment summaries. I like to start by tapping the info button on the top left corner and watching the video tutorial. These are a great overview.
Click the "add student" at the bottom of the screen to get started and enter the student's information.
Choose what type of Spanish is spoken by choosing the correct dialectical influence of the student. You can also tap languages to choose between English, Spanish, or both.
Tap "New Assessment" to begin. If you chose both as their language, it will prompt you to decide on which language you'd like tested first.
After 8 slides, the app will ask you if the child is performing well enough in the chosen language to continue with the test. If not, it will switch the targets to the other language.
During the assessment, students are prompted to name various pictures that contain specific phonemes. The targeted phonemes are highlighted in green (see below). If the child makes an error, just click the phoneme where the mistake occurred.
You can then choose the type of error that was made. Once the error is recorded, the phoneme is highlighted red to indicate an error (see below).
The gray arrows at the top right corner allow you to flip the phonetic word at the top upside down. This is great for if you are sitting across from the child and need the word to face you.
The page icon on the right side of the screen opens up a note page, in case you need to add specific notes on the different words.
Toward the end of the assessment, there are multi-syllable probes that allow for you to see if their errors or intelligibility breaks down once the number of syllables are increased.
The English target words are recorded the exact same way as the Spanish. If you clicked both under "Languages," the test will deliver probes in both English and Spanish.
After finishing the slides, tap on an estimated level of intelligibility to add to the assessment. Then click the "Results" orange button at the bottom right corner of the screen. The results will yield a raw score.
The results can be viewed in a breakdown of position, manner, voicing, words, multi-syllabic words, and error. Just click the tabs to switch through the different results.
Tap "share" to review, print, or email the assessment to yourself.
The "setting" button at the top right corner will give you the option of turning off transition sounds (like "muy bien") between slides. You can also turn on/off recording single sounds and indicate whether to display the written words.
When you email the results, everything is written up in a long detailed report. This is all ready to go and be added to your eval.
Though the test is not normed, it can give you some great information on the specific articulation and phonology difficulties a child has. I really like it for comparing Spanish vs English artic skills.
What I dig about this app:
- It's easy and straightforward to navigate.
- It yields lots of great data about both Spanish and English articulation skills.
- It's a much needed tool, since there isn't many bilingual or Spanish articulation assessments out there.
- I love having an assessment on an iPad, making it super portable. This is really good for me since I travel to test my bilingual kids.
- I also like the detailed results broken down in different ways, allowing for easy comparison between languages.
What could make it better:
- I'd love to see this app normed/standardized one day. This would make it easier to explain results to parents and justify qualifying a child into therapy.
Overall, this is another high-quality app from Smarty Ears! You can grab it at iTunes
HERE for $49.99.
