We talk a lot about the challenges of evaluating students who are dual language learners. Many of those challenges are related to selecting assessment measures and knowing what to expect given their language proficiency in their two languages. One approach to this is to get an estimate of language exposure and use in each of their languages. In this post, there are two things that I want to share with you. First, I want to share a case study that really illustrates the importance of understanding language exposure and use. Second, I want to show you how you can quickly estimate language proficiency in each language using a language exposure and use calculator. 

A Language Exposure and Use Case Study with a Recently Immigrated Secondary Student

Let’s first take a look at our case study. This is a real situation that was shared with me by a speech-language pathologist on the west coast. She is an SLP Impact member who reached out saying she could really use some help with this one. I am sharing this with her permission and all identifying information was removed prior to her sharing details with me. Here are some of the details she shared about the student, who we will call Maria. I think this is a valuable speech-language evaluation case study for us because it really speaks to the importance understanding language exposure and language use in order to interpret evaluation results.

This is a case study that involves a secondary students who immigrated to the United States relatively recently. We have so many things to take into consideration for these evaluations, including the educational system in their home country, the amount of years they have been exposed to English, the amount of time during the day they are exposed to each language, how they will access the curriculum, the language(s) of peer groups, and much more. 

Here’s what we know about this student’s background and language use. 

Maria…

• is an 8th grade student whose primary language is Spanish
• has been in the US for 3 years
• has a history of learning challenges per parent report.
• has a history of attention/memory difficulties
• qualified for special education services 3 years ago (upon arrival in U.S.) for SLD/SLI in a different school district. Goals included:  listing attributes of nouns in English and creating simple sentences in English.
• was in a dual language program in her previous district where they were able to provide most of her instruction in Spanish.
• Had a peer group of Spanish speakers in her previous district
• Has a peer group of Spanish speakers in her current district
• Currently receives all academic instruction in English in the classroom but has some support in Spanish when pulled out of the classroom or when working with Spanish-speaking peers in the classroom.

The SLP in the current district has implemented speech therapy to focus on the goals of the IEP from the previous district. At Maria’s current school all academic instruction is in English and all of her speech services are in English. Maria has made little to no progress with her language goals. Her English vocabulary is minimal. This year, they have worked on naming categories and formulating simple grammatical structures (he/she/they + is/are + verbing) and stating the function of objects, all with very minimal progress.

Here are details the SLP shared:

Spanish is spoken in the home, and also with her large circle of friends, so the only practice she really receives for English is instruction here at school, but she is not able to access a lot since all instruction is in English. 

Her English Language Proficiency scores have actually dropped since 2022. She is still at a very beginning level in all domains. 

Test results in Spanish are as follows: 

Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth Edition, Spanish Bilingual Edition (ROWPVT-4-SBE)- Standard Score 93, Percentile 32 

Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth Edition, Spanish Bilingual Edition  (EOWPVT—BSE) Standard Score 68, Percentile 2 

CELF-4 Spanish Core Language SS 75, Percentile 5 (Repeating sentences really brought her score down…it was her lowest score with a scaled score of 3). 

Repeating sentences-3

Formulating Sentences-6

Word Classes (Total) – 6

Word Definitions-8

Conversationally, the interpreter said her language was intact grammatically, and the only thing that really was of note was some word-finding difficulty. Otherwise, she would not have thought her to have disordered language conversationally. 

English scores are all below the 1st percentile. An oral language sample was not able to be produced in English. I am unsure of where to go with this student. Progress in English has been so minimal, yet her Spanish skills seem to have shown improvement. 

I’ve attached a copy of her Spanish language sample. Clearly, Spanish continues to be her dominant language. There is evidence of word-finding challenges and some run-on sentences, but overall, a fairly solid retell of the story. 

Memory difficulties: Our psychologist just assessed her, and her working memory on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition, (WISC-V), Spanish was 62, placing her in the extremely low range. This is similar to the results on her initial assessment in 2022. 

This fit with the information processing tasks for ELL’s. She was able to repeat 2 nonsense syllables with 90% accuracy, 3 syllables with only 30% accuracy. and none containing four syllables. 

I would definitely say she has less than 30% for exposure/use of English. While she is technically exposed to English via instruction, she appears to access very little, and really does not attempt to speak English. (understandable, because it is out of her comfort zone). 

I did some dynamic assessment with the SLAM cards, walking her through the dog story in English. This was what she was able to generate:

• Girl watch the dog
• And the girl is happy
• The mother said no dog
• Put the dog in the backpack
• Go the wash
• Is not clean

For any English task, she lacks the basic vocabulary to really generate much output. She has a very limited repertoire of English nouns and verbs, and is not yet able to answer personal questions about her age, where she lives, state functions of common objects (even with picture supports), or label simple categories. 

Informal Measure of Oral Language Task A: 

Okay, so the first thing I want to point out here is that we have a very different level of English and Spanish skills. During a dynamic assessment task in English, Maria was able to produce a 6-word simple sentence. That was her longest utterance. Many of her other utterances were not complete sentences in English and contained errors.

Now take a look at her Spanish. She’s using compound sentences and complex sentences to tell about her past and talk about things she likes. She’s using the imperfect tense and preterit tense verbs. She’s using adjectives and adverbs and prepositions, and much, much more.

So, we’re not going to do a full assessment here but I want to point out a few things. 

• Her difficulty with memory, which was document by multiple people in different testing sessions needs to be taken into consideration when looking at her scores on the Repeating Sentences subtest.

• We also have to wonder what the testing looked like in the first district when she initially immigrated to the United States. Was she tested in English or in Spanish? Why were her goals based on productions in English?

• She is a relatively recent immigrant and is a secondary school student. In that case, what are our expectations on a test like the CELF-4-Spanish, which includes a lot of academic concepts that we’re not sure she’s been exposed to.

• In this evaluation, if we really take a look at her language exposure and use, we’ll see that her language exposure and use in English is well below 30%. Current research on language exposure and use tells us that this is really important to know.

Why is it important to gather information about language exposure and use? 

Understanding bilingual students’ current language exposure is crucial for evaluating their language use patterns. Research by Peña, Bedore, and colleagues shows that if a child’s exposure to one language is less than 30%, standardized testing results in that language may not aid in diagnostic decisions. Their studies, which focused on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA), utilized the Bilingual Input-Output Survey (BIOS) to assess language exposure and use, providing a detailed method valuable for research and evaluation planning.

It’s important for us to note that the language exposure and use calculations in this study, as well as in other studies, uses a much more detailed calculation than our calculator does. Peña and Bedore and colleagues (2018, 2020) used the Bilingual Input-Output Survey (BIOS). It takes longer than our calculator but allows you to get a more detailed picture. Another calculator designed for research purposes is the Language Exposure Assessment Tool (LEAP). 

Bilingual Input-Output Survey (BIOS) is a research tool that was developed with the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment Tool. 

The Language Exposure Assessment Tool (LEAP). This is an article about the reliability and validity study. You can access the actual tool in the CHILDES Research Center online. 

Two other articles of interest that give insight into the assessment practices and language dominance are:

Bedore, Peña, Anaya, Nieto, Lugo-Neris & Baron, 2018

Peña, Bedore, Lugo-Neris, Albudoor, 2020

Here it is—the Evalubox Language Exposure and Use Calculator.

You (or parents and teachers) can use sliders to estimate a dual language learner’s exposure and use in each language. If the result you get is that the student has less than 30% in one languags, conduct informal probes. If you end up seeing very lopsided results like we did in this case study, there’s no sense in spending your time learning that they are in the first percentile in all tasks in that language. That’s just a waste of your time that buys you little-to-no information about a child’s language abilities. And, as SLPs, I know we don’t have time like that to waste. You can actually use the sliders and watch a short video on it if you go to this page.

When we used these sliders for Maria, here’s what the outcome was:

Her overall English exposure and use was 11%. Here’s your time saver—don’t spend your time doing English standardized tests with a student with this level of English language exposure and use. It’s a waste of your time!