Dynamic Assessment of Bilingual Children in English

Previously, I talked about some exciting work that was being done in the area of dynamic assessment. This work together is looking at how to apply dynamic assessment to ELLs. We have our own contribution to make as well. The results give SLPs another potential strategy to use to determine whether children have language difference or language impairment. What’s really cool about this is that it works with children who know just a little English.

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Dynamic assessment can contrbute to diagnostic decisions about bilinguals

Last June, I gave a keynote on dynamic assessment at SRCLD and presented recently analyzed data using DA with bilingual kindergarteners. We are currently in the process of writing the paper on this and hope to submit it soon for publication. If all goes well with the review and revision process maybe in a year it’ll be accepted and then a few months after that before it is available. Meanwhile however, we’re not the only ones to take on this question. So, here’s a summary of what I’ve found recently.

Word Gaps in Low SES Children

This discussion on language log about the word gap based on SES brought to mind early work I did on dynamic assessment of word learning (Peña, Quinn, & Iglesias, 1992; Peña, Iglesias, & Lidz, 2001). The word gap issue focuses on the differences between low and high SES children in the number of words that they hear. The number of words they hear is related to the number of words they know. In our work on DA, my co-authors and I were not interested so much in how low SES children stacked up in terms of number of words they knew (indexed by a standardized expressive single word test) but in their word-learning abilities.

Dynamic Assessment Webinar

I’m doing a webinar. What’s that you ask? Well, I’m not totally sure, but I’m doing one anyway. In theory though, you view PowerPoint on your computer and get on the telephone to listen to the talk. It’s done in real-time and I think you can ask questions.

Anyway, the webinar is sponsored by Second Language & Literacy Connection. My webinar will be on Feb 23rd focusing on dynamic assessment of narratives. Here’s the link if you’re interested: Dynamic Assessment Webinar.

Testing ESL Children: What we can do now

One of the challenges in assessment of bilingual children is deciding whether or not they have language impairment. On one hand SLPs might decide to wait for children to learn more English before they assess them. On the other hand it’s important to identify children who have language impairment early so that we can intervene.

As of yet there are no standardized tests for bilingual children. There are some standardized tests for children who speak other languages. But, often these tests are inappropriate because they do not apply to children who speak two languages. There are some folks working on development of such tests for Spanish-English speakers (including me), these are few and don’t apply to all language pairs or all ages. At least not yet. So, what can we do NOW for the kids who are referred for assessment of language ability? What do we do to make decisions about language ability in the absence of standardized tests or even in the absence of personnel who speak the child’s language?

Dynamic Assessment with Bilingual Children

A particular challenge in assessment of bilingual children is to distinguish between differences in their language performance due to not knowing English and differences (or low scores) due to having language impairment or learning disabilities. I’ve been doing research in dynamic assessment for a number of years to explore whether this is an option for children from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Two of my research studies focused on evaluation of children’s naming skills and included bilingual children in a Head Start program: Peña, Quinn, & Iglesias (1992) and Peña, Iglesias, & Lidz (2001).