The Department of Education presents a Resource Packet designed to help assess a child with a disability. To determine whether a student with a limited proficiency in English has a disability, differentiating a disability from a cultural or language difference is crucial.
Students may exhibit a decrease in primary language proficiency through the inability to understand and express academic concepts due to lack of academic instruction in primary language, simplification of complex grammatical constructions, replacement of grammatical forms and word meanings in the primary language by those in English, and the convergence of separate forms or meanings in the primary language and English. These language differences may result in a referral to Special Education because they do not fit the standard for either language even though they are not he result of a disability.
There are many things an assessor must consider to determine if the language difficulty is due to inadequate language instruction or the actual presence of a disability. Has the effectiveness of the English instruction been documented? Was instruction delivered using the second-language teacher or was it received in the general education classroom? Is the program meeting the student’s language development needs?
We must also have information on the child’s background information, language, phonology, and fluency considerations.
I thought it was also interesting to see the developmental stages in the acquisition of a second language.
- Silent/Receptive: includes limited comprehension, hesitant, often confused/unsure
-Early Production: includes yes/no responses; improving comprehension skills, relates words to environment, one word verbal responses-groupings of two or three words
-Speech Emergence: transition from short phrases to simple sentences, continuing mispronunciations
-Intermediate Fluency: transition to more complex sentences, engage in conversation and produce connected vocabulary
-Advanced Fluency: student can interact extensively with native speakers, few errors in grammar
MCS has a high population of hispanic speaking students and Laotians. We currently contract with a spanish speaking SLP who assesses those students whom we seriously question that it may be a language barrier. We also have a Laotian interpreter who assists our SLPs when assessing laotian students.
ReplyDeleteNot too long ago, but before I ever realized that this was an issue in our schools (oh, how naive I was!), I was told a very sad story. My parents were looking for a new house, and we were those people who wanted the back story of the home if we could get it. We couldn't imagine why anyone would want to sell this property and especially leave it so quickly. We found out later that the home had belonged to a hispanic family. They really loved the house-it was perfect for them!-but they had to move so that their children could go to a different school. It turned out that the children were treated so terribly--the other students were mean to them, if I remember right, they had been referred for special education even though there was nothing wrong with them (fits perfectly with your post, right), and it totally changed their outlook. They went from children who loved school and did well to children who hated school and never wanted to go back. The mom had to sell the house and move away so that she could put her kids in a school where they could succeed. This, to me, is absolutely heart-breaking. I am so glad you posted this, and I hope many, many people read it. This is such an important issue!
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