President & Founder, Bilingual Speech Language Pathologist
Dr. Ellen Kester is the dynamic leader behind Bilinguistics, a company that has served speech language pathologists and children with communication disorders for over two decades. With a Ph.D. and CCC-SLP credentials, Ellen founded Bilinguistics to address the unique speech and language needs of children from diverse backgrounds. Her passion for languages ignited during her teenage years in Asia, where she dabbled in Malay, Mandarin, and French. Back in Texas, she embraced Spanish, diving deep into bilingual assessments—a field that continues to fuel her enthusiasm in speech-language pathology.
I did not have a chance to attend the seminars you offered. However, the topics addressed are very important. Even though we indicate that no one test or tests tell the entire story, members of the assessment teams in school focus on performance on children with multilingual and multicultural students on “statistical data”. We need to look at the whole child, and their growth over time, if we can. We have to ensure that teaching strategies that are implemented are helping students to learn with greater success- no one method works, as we all know.
Additionally, I would like to add that when we are assessing bilingual students we need to consider the development of each language over time, if applicable. Often times the primary language is not developed because the child does not have a solid foundation in their first language-
We couldn’t have said it better. There is so much to consider outside of the data when we are testing a child in order to make the right call. And the conference starts next week so you can still attend: Diversity Evaluation Conference. The presentations will also be recorded and available inside SLP Impact
Dr. Langdon, Thanks for your valuable comments! You haven’t missed it! Dr. Peña is on this afternoon, Dr. Ortiz tomorrow, and Dr. Wyatt on Thursday. It’s going to be great!
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I did not have a chance to attend the seminars you offered. However, the topics addressed are very important. Even though we indicate that no one test or tests tell the entire story, members of the assessment teams in school focus on performance on children with multilingual and multicultural students on “statistical data”. We need to look at the whole child, and their growth over time, if we can. We have to ensure that teaching strategies that are implemented are helping students to learn with greater success- no one method works, as we all know.
Additionally, I would like to add that when we are assessing bilingual students we need to consider the development of each language over time, if applicable. Often times the primary language is not developed because the child does not have a solid foundation in their first language-
We couldn’t have said it better. There is so much to consider outside of the data when we are testing a child in order to make the right call. And the conference starts next week so you can still attend: Diversity Evaluation Conference. The presentations will also be recorded and available inside SLP Impact
Dr. Langdon, Thanks for your valuable comments! You haven’t missed it! Dr. Peña is on this afternoon, Dr. Ortiz tomorrow, and Dr. Wyatt on Thursday. It’s going to be great!