Language proficiency exams have been used since the development of bilingual education. The purpose of the following case study is to demonstrate how the English and Spanish proficiency exams given to a child for admission into a dual language (Spanish-English) program framed a child in a deficit view and missed the proficiency the child had…

Purpose: This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English. Method: One hundred fifteen kindergarten and first-grade Spanish--English-speaking children completed measures of vocabulary and sentence repetition in Spanish and English. Scores were derived from…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…

The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, 2nd Edition (CTOPP-2; Wagner et al., 2013) is commonly used in k-12 public schools to assess basic cognitive processing skills foundational for reading achievement. Psychometric support for its use with dual language learners (DLLs), a group representing over 10% of the school-aged population in…

Purpose: First, we sought to extend our knowledge of second language (L2) receptive compared to expressive narrative skills in bilingual children with and without primary language impairment (PLI). Second, we sought to explore whether narrative receptive and expressive performance in bilingual children's L2 differed based on the type of contextual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish-English speaking children's sentence repetition and…

This study reports on a small-scale, longitudinal investigation on L2 Spanish oral development by English-home language (EHL) learners in an English/Spanish Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program in rural, eastern United States. It examined EHL learners' oral ability in L2 Spanish based on longitudinal assessment data from Kindergarten, Grade 2, and…

The measurement of self-regulation in young children has been a topic of great interest as researchers and practitioners work to help ensure that children have the skills they need to succeed as they start school. The present study examined how a revised version of a commonly used measure of behavioral self-regulation, the…

This paper addresses the issue of integrating students with special needs into foreign language programs in the early childhood years. A partnership between a university and a charter school in central Florida began as a result of parent and teacher interest in providing a foreign language program for its prekindergarten students. Since 2014,…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

This quantitative study examined the effect of a student's entry point into a school district and his/her performance on the New York State English Language Arts and Integrated Algebras Regents Exams. The subjects of this study were students assigned to the 2010 and 2011 cohorts from one Long Island school district. Three entry points were…

The "Washington English Language Proficiency Assessment" (WELPA) is a No Child Left Behind (NCLB)-compliant instrument that is used in Grades K-12 as a formal and standardized method of measuring language proficiency. The test results provide important information for classifying English Language Learners (ELLs) and subsequently for…

Across the United States, and in the states served by the Regional Educational Laboratory West (REL West) in particular, there is widespread concern about how to successfully educate the growing number of English language learner (ELL) students, especially those identified as long-term ELL students and those identified as reclassified fluent…

Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to…