beyond on bilingualism, assessment of bilingual students, and effective intervention practices. Dr. Kester has served as Adjunct Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, teaching courses in language development, assessment and intervention, early childhood intervention, preschoolers with special needs, and measurement. Her research and clinical work address the important issue of differentiating bilingual children with typical development from those with language impairment, and identifying appropriate goals for intervention with bilinguals. Ellen’s passion for languages started when she lived in Asia as a teenager. She learned to speak a little Malay and Mandarin and studied French while in Asia. She then returned to Texas several years later and decided Spanish would be useful too. She dove into the world of bilingual assessments in graduate school and that continues to be her passion in the field of speech-language pathology. When she’s not working, she loves being on the tennis court or traveling with her husband and three children.

Financial Disclosure: Ellen Kester is the founder and owner of Bilinguistics. She receives a salary from Bilinguistics and Bilinguistics receives royalties from some products mentioned in the workshop.

Non-Financial Disclosure: Dr. Kester does not have any non-financial relationships to disclose.

The number of different languages we encounter in our work as speech-language pathologists seems to grow every year. We’ve always seen lot of children who speak Spanish but recently we’ve seen an increase in those who speak Mandarin, Vietnamese, Urdu, Bengali, Albanian, Pashto, and so many more languages. With the limited time we have in our jobs, how can we possibly conduct effective evaluations in so many languages? We need great resources to do this job well and we’re going to show you where to find them in this course.

We’ll start with a free tool to calculate language exposure and use. Understanding the languages your client speaks as well as how often they hear and use each of their languages helps us plan out what we need for the evaluation. We’ll share current research to guide your assessment plan.

Next, we need to gather information from parents. We know we get more rich information from families when we give them an avenue to share their information in their native language. We’ll show you where you can find free parent questionnaires in many different languages. These were created through a collaborative effort with SLPs across the United States and they are available for downloading on the Bilinguistics web site.

Probably the most critical part of the dual language evaluation is understanding the similarities and differences between English and the child’s home language. We need this information to make good diagnostic decisions. We’ll share with you the World Language Library on the Bilinguistics website and show you how to use the information to decide whether typical cross-linguistic influence is at play or whether you should be concerned about the speech and language patterns you see.

Our goal for this course is that you walk away feeling confident about evaluating bilingual children and armed with amazing resources to do your job effectively and efficiently!

Participants will be able to:
● Describe how to calculate language exposure and use and how to use the information for planning an assessment.
● Describe culturally sensitive procedures for gathering parent information.
● List the three steps of working with an interpreter.
● Describe how a contrastive analysis is used to categorize speech and language patterns as typical or atypical.

Time-Ordered Agenda
10 minutes: Introduction and Need for Understanding Processes for Dual Language Assessments
10 minutes: How to Use Language Exposure and Use Information in Your Assessment
10 minutes: Effectively Gathering Information about Concerns of Parents and Teachers
10 minutes: Obtaining Information About Different Languages
10 minutes: Selecting Assessment Tools and Procedures
10 minutes: Conducting Language Samples with Dual Language Learners
10 minutes: Analyzing Qualitative Testing Data
10 minutes: Dynamic Assessment Targets and Results
5 minutes: Selecting Goals
5 minutes: Conclusion and Questions