Advancing equity in early childhood education is crucial as our broader society faces issues of inequities across systems, including education. Professionals must honor children's home language and cultural contexts, coming from a perspective of value and respect rather than from a traditionally dominant Eurocentric perspective. Through this…

Background: Gaps between dual language learners (DLLs) and monolingual English-speaking children have been reported at kindergarten entry, and many DLL children are classified as long-term English learners, having less access to the general curriculum in the upper grades (NASEM, 2017). The supposed underperformance of DLLs might be due to the…

Oral language is foundational to literacy. Because their language is under construction, emergent bilingual students have unique needs related to literacy development regardless of the language of instruction. Knowledge teachers gain through formative assessment of student oral language can guide decisions about literacy instruction. The purpose…

This study examines how three bilingual education teachers engaged with a transitional bilingual policy while balancing the demands of monolingual high-stakes assessments in ways that contributed to advocacy on behalf of their bilingual learners. The consequences of high-stakes accountability can be exacerbated in bilingual settings, because in…

Building on theories of cross linguistic transfer, reading proficiency of Spanish-speaking Emerging Bilinguals may be enhanced by providing tiered instruction through multitiered systems of support. To realize the benefits of this systems-level framework, technically adequate universal screening assessments to support teachers' decision making are…

The goal of this study was to examine written translation as a means to: a) build on the theoretical notion that a bilingual individual's languages are shared; b) operationalize biliterate ability; and c) propose a new method of assessment for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Drawing from the fields of cognitive psychology and…

This study explored the application of a holistic bilingual view to assess the writing of emerging bilingual children. The study is part of a 5-year longitudinal research and intervention project that explores the biliteracy development of Spanish-English emerging bilingual students who are receiving instruction in both languages. Participants…

This study compared the performance of referred bilingual Hispanic children on the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS) theory as measured by English and Spanish versions of the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS; Naglieri & Das, 1997a). The results suggest that students scored similarly on both English and Spanish versions of…

The Preschool IDEA Oral Language Proficiency Test: Spanish (Pre-IPT:Spanish) developed by W. Williams and E. Dalton (1989) purports to determine the level of oral language proficiency for preschool children, aged 3 to 5 years. The instrument is designed to identify the dominant language of bilingual or primarily Spanish-speaking children, and the…

Data on language competence and language use were obtained for 99 Spanish/English bilingual elementary school children (kindergarten through fourth grade) from Albuquerque. The children's language skills were assessed by teachers, interviewers, and the children themselves. The teachers and the children also estimated the extent to which the…

Paper presented at the 1973 TESOL Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (HW)

Before a bilingual program can be set up, students who are potential candidates for such a program must be identified. A study was made to investigate the interrelationships of three commonly used measures of "language dominance": the Language Facility Test (LFT), the Home Bilingual Usage Estimate (HBUE), and the Teacher Judgment Questionnaire…

The Lincoln Guidance Research Project, funded by the National Defense Education Act, studied a group of junior high school students in a transitional neighborhood with major emphasis on educational needs of students who will find employment in service occupations. Recommendations included intensive remedial work at the seventh grade level,…

The rationale for using multiple measures to assess language ability in bilingual students is examined. The relationships among the Language Facility Test, teacher judgment, home bilingual usage estimate, and, where possible, standardized achievement tests are investigated, utilizing data from a study of 1800 Washington State students. (Author/GC)

This is the teacher's guide accompanying a reader and a workbook that are part of an ungraded language arts and reading program that can be used in classes from upper elementary through high school. The program is designed around reading selections which present aspects of history, culture, and present-day experiences of special relevance to the…