Angie Neal is the Policy Advisor for Speech-Language Services and Early Literacy at the South Carolina State Department of Education. She is board member with the State Education Agency Communication Disability Council (SEACDC), the recipient of the Rolland Van Hattum Award for contributions to schools (SC) and the Nancy McKinley Award for leadership in SLP (OH). She is a published author and presents on a wide variety of topics across the United States.

Financial: Angie Neal is receiving compensation from Bilinguistics in exchange for this presentation.

Non-Financial: Angie Neal is employed by the SC State Department of Education and is the Board President for the State Education Agencies Communication Disabilities Council.

When there is suspicion of a disability in the school setting, there is a problem solving team that meets and reviews key educational data. However, without an understanding of how multilingual learners differ from their monolingual peers, the process often omits critical data necessary to determine the need to move forward with an evaluation for a suspected disability.

Often, school personnel may remark that the student needs more time to acquire English before they can be evaluated or that the student must be exposed to a certain amount of English before they can be evaluated; neither of which would be considered as being compliant with the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

IDEA requires that limited English proficiency be ruled out as the reason for the students difficulties. However, that does not mean that the multilingual learner cannot exhibit a disability in their primary language and/or that the disability cannot show up in both languages. It is for this reason that school teams must be familiar with IDEA’s requirements for an evaluation, including administering assessments in the student’s primary language unless it is not feasible to do, as well being familiar with the variety of resources to help conduct an assessment of a multilingual learner when the evaluator is not fluent in the student’s language.

Additionally, there are instructional considerations that must be discussed especially when there is suspicion of a Specific Learning Disability due to difficulties with reading and/or writing. This includes asking questions about the literacy instruction provided such that additional time and explicit instruction has been dedicated to teaching the phonemes, morphology, and syntax of General American English that are not present in the student’s primary language.

Finally, it is of critical importance to include not only the parents in the problem-solving process, but the multilingual teacher as well. Both individuals make key contributions to the review of existing data to determine whether or not a disability may be suspected. This includes information about the student’s previous educational opportunities and struggles, how the difficulties may be different from similar multilingual learners, performance on multilingual assessments in addition to progress towards iLap goals, and the effectiveness of accommodations designed to support the multilingual student while advancing their proficiency with English.

Participants will be able to:
• Explain difference vs. disability across educational domains
• Discuss the requirements of IDEA in the assessment of multilingual learners.
• List four key questions to ask support suspicion of a disability in a multilingual learner

Time-Ordered Agenda
10 minutes Systematic Investigative Routines vs. MTSS
05 minutes How Do Languages Differ
05 minutes The Stages of Language Acquisition
25 minutes Difference vs. Disability Across Educational Domains
10 minutes Four Key Questions to Ask to Support Suspicion of a Disability in a Multilingual Leaner
20 minutes Requirements of IDEA in the evaluation of a Multilingual Learner
15 minutes Question and answer