Oral Language Issues and Assessment of Oral Language

Abstract

This chapter details formal and informal measures and methods of assessing oral language proficiency in students’ first and second languages. An assessment of students’ oral proficiency in their first language should be made before administering measures of achievement, cognitive processing, and intelligence. Typically, speech-language pathologists take the lead in assessing oral language. However, psychologists must have an understanding of the issues so they can make determinations as to the reliability and validity of the measures they administer. For high-incidence languages, such as Spanish and French, there are standardized measures for assessing oral language proficiency. But even with Spanish and French, whereas it is reasonable to administer and interpret standardized tests when recent immigrants are assessed in their first language, it is not appropriate to administer those measures after a child has been immersed in the second language for 2 or more years because of first language attrition. Evaluation teams are often reluctant to assess children who have not yet had time to become proficient in English. However, this is discriminatory toward English learners with disabilities. In many cases, informal measures of gathering data about oral language proficiency in the first language must be employed. We detail sources of information that help determine oral language proficiency in the first language and in English, such as home language surveys and tests that are administered by English as a second language (ESL) teachers.