A review of theoretical issues and understanding in the area of Spanish-English assessment material

Includes bibliographical references (pages 88-94)In the United States, normal bilingual Spanish-English\ud speaking children are often miscategorized as\ud mentally retarded or language disabled. This misclassification\ud by educational specialists has been related to\ud factors such as lack of knowledge of second language\ud development, limited understanding of pragmatics, and\ud lack of high quality materials for the evaluation of the\ud bilingual child.\ud It has been noted that often the professional who\ud deals with bilingual children does not have enough\ud knowledge about how a second language develops and how\ud it is compared to the native language. This may happen\ud either because of mere negligence or because of the few\ud existing studies in second language development relating\ud to acquisitional relationships between L1 and L2. The\ud specialist also tends to overlook the culture from which\ud the client to be evaluated comes. Another difficult\ud task found when dealing with bilingual children is the selection\ud of appropriate tests. As an example, some available language to be used\ud to evaluate bilingual children. The specialist should know that the\ud evaluation of the bilingual child should be done in both\ud languages. This is important in order to avoid labeling\ud as a communicative problem what might only be the normal\ud bilingual language acquisition process. However, if\ud the bilingual child should show low proficiency in both\ud languages, before referring the child for further\ud diagnosis, the specialist should make sure that the low\ud proficiency manifested by the bilingual child is not\ud caused by the characteristics of the test used. For\ud example, some of these characteristics might be biased\ud instruments, inappropriate dialectal norms in scoring\ud and other details that could limit the linguistic\ud expression of these children.\ud Therefore, for a better understanding and\ud evaluation of the bilingual child, the professional\ud involved should be aware of second language acquisition\ud theory, and the strengths and weaknesses of devices\ud available for evaluation