Validity Considerations for Assessing Language Proficiency in Young Language Minority Students

Abstract

ABSTRACT The population of young language minority (LM) students is rapidly growing worldwide due to global migration and immigration trends. The increasing representation of young LM students in school settings creates high demand for the language assessment of LM students in order to meet the needs of stakeholders, such as governments and language programs. This special issue thus focuses on the validity considerations for assessing young LM students, defined as school-age children and adolescents between the ages of 5 to 15 who speak alanguage at home that is different from the majority/societal language or the primary language of schooling. We conceptualize validity following the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, and we focus on assessments for young LM students who have not been discussed sufficiently in the previous studies: LM children who learn an additional language other than English (Study 1 by Butler & Sakurai, acase of Japanese); indigenous learners of so-called standard English in Australia (Study 2 by Hudson & Angelo), multilingual children in Norway (Study 3 by Flognfeldt, Tsagari, Šurkalović, & Tishakov), and bilingual children with language disorder in the United States (Study 4 by Peña, Bedore, Lugo-Neris, & Albudoor). The four empirical studies examined different dimensions of validity considerations and the unique challenges for assessing young LM students. They represent multi-disciplinary perspectives and avariety of methodological orientations and techniques. They also provide rich representations of validity considerations in language assessments in different regions of the world as well as majority-minority language combinations. The special issue not only informs test validity theories but has practical implications for promoting educational opportunities and equity for young LM students in various parts of the world.