This paper deals with the history and practices of the language assessment policy being used by the state of Illinois' transitional bilingual education programs serving over 42,000 students. The first section of the paper treats the history of bilingual program evaluation efforts. It divides the discussion into three periods, prior to 1976, from…

This phase of the downstate Illinois bilingual education program included: locating all past data still in existence in 1976; determining what data were actually retrievable and usable; reporting on these data retrospectively; and finally, collecting new data for a continuing longitudinal study. There were 44 school districts with 4,579 students…

The purpose of this public school bilingual census was to identify the attendance centers in the state of Illinois which had students in need of bilingual education. According to an Illinois state law, any attendance center with 20 or more students of limited English language proficiency of the same non-English language must provide a bilingual…