Assessment Tools and DLLs
Don Porter: OK. Now, main characteristics of assessment tools that can reliably measure things like cognitive and linguistic development in young dual language learners.
Linda Espinosa: The main thing, I mean, we have language assessment tools in Spanish and in English. Supposedly equivalent, they're not. Most of them are not. Most of them have been normed on monolingual populations.
The most popular ones have been normed on either monolingual English speaking — that's their English portion — or monolingual Spanish speaking — that's their Spanish portion. Doesn't fit our kids. Our kids are growing up with two languages.
So the norms that are relevant for children who have two languages are different than either one of these two groups. So when you get the results of your children in your programs, they look delayed. They may or they may not be delayed but the assessment instruments are not yielding valid results because our kids are just different than the ones that the test was developed on.
There are a couple of instruments that I think are better, are moving us forward. But that's a whole area that there's currently a lot of funded research that's going into that right now. And we're really trying to figure out ...
What I've done ...
In the absence of having really valid and reliable instruments, what I've done is suggested procedures that include information from parents watching kids, administering language assessments, and pulling it all together. I'd say to make tentative hypotheses about language functioning because everything is full of error that we get.
Hear from Dr. Linda Espinosa, retired professor of early childhood education at the University of Missouri, as she talks about what assessment tools can be used with children who are dual language learners. This clip is part of the Dual Language Learners: Program and Family Support module, one of several EarlyEdU Alliance Higher Education Learning Modules.
