How Language Proficiency Tests Mislead Us about Ability: Implications for English Language Learner Placement in Special Education

By J. MacSwan, K. Rolstad. Teachers College Record, 2006

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors argue that English language learner (ELL) language assessment policy and poor language tests partly account for ELLs’ disproportionate representation in special education. Previous research indicates that many states routinely assess ELLs’ first language (L1) at initial enrollment and that ELLs identified as limited in both languages have relatively high rates of identification in special education. Two common tests, the Language Assessment Scales-Oral (LAS—O) Español and the Idea Proficiency Test I–Oral (IPT) Spanish, are shown to identify 74% and 90%, respectively, Spanish-background ELLs (N = 145) as limited L1 students, whereas a natural language measure found only 2% of participants to have unexpectedly high morphological error rates. Correlations are provided. The authors recommend changes in language testing policies and practices for ELLs.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17f86a7a9c33ce9a4f6422ff39627941e19f0431

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Citations in the corpus

The role of vocabulary depth in predicting reading comprehension among English monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children in elementary school (2012, methodology): “Limitations and future directions This study relied on mostly published, standardized, norm-referenced measures, which are quite often biased against children of color (Ladson-Billings, 2006; MacSwan & Rolstad, 2006); Valdés & Figueroa, 1994).”
Participant Structures as Professional Learning Tasks and the Development of Pedagogical Language Knowledge among Preservice Teachers. (2011, background): “Though Cummins’s work has been influential to bilingual and English-as-a-second-language teachers, researchers have been critical of Cummins’s constructs (e.g., MacSwan & Rolstad, 2006).”