Susan Unruh

The Development and Validation of a Spanish Language Version of the Test Anxiety Inventory for Children and Adolescents

This study details the development and validation of a Spanish language version of the Test Anxiety Inventory for Children and Adolescents (TAICA) for elementary and secondary students. In this study, the TAICA was adapted and administered to a sample of 197 students, 87 males and 110 females, aged 9 to 19 years, in Grades 4 to 12. Results of an exploratory factor analysis and item content analysis revealed that the factor structure and the items on the different dimensions of the Test Anxiety Inventory for Children and Adolescents—Spanish version (TAICA-S) were similar to the TAICA. Internal consistency reliability estimates for the TAICA-S scores ranged from .68 to .93 for the total sample and male and female subsamples. Gender differences on the TAICA-S were noted, with females scoring higher than males on the Worry subscale. Implications of the findings for educators and mental health experts who work with Hispanic elementary and secondary students are discussed.

Math Problem-Solving

When English is the language of instruction, proficiency in English is strongly correlated with math performance. Students must have the oral language skills to understand instruction and to convey questions to the teacher, as well as the reading skills to understand word problems and the writing skills to respond to them. Learning math skills is not dependent on learning a specific language. However, language is the conduit for learning mathematics. Mathematics educators advise that English learners should increase their proficiency in using English concurrently with increasing their mathematics reasoning skills. Although the English language used in math instruction may need to be simplified for English learners, the complexity of the mathematical reasoning expected of these students should not be reduced. When an English learner has difficulty with word problems, it is important to determine whether the difficulty is due to the words used in the problems, to the spoken language proficiency required to demonstrate proficiency, or to the math reasoning and problem-solving skills of the student. We discuss clinical signs of a math problem-solving disorder and recommended assessment practices, as well as recommended instructional practices to help English learners.

Assessment and Intervention Tools

This chapter is a convenient compendium of assessment and intervention tools for use with English learners. There are useful tables that summarize the clinical signs of specific learning disability in English learners, data that can be gathered through interviews and record reviews, what to do and what not to do when testing English learners, and steps in the intervention process. There are detailed descriptions of tests for use with English learners, standardized tests in Spanish, screeners, and progress monitors. When using the problem-solving process to provide tiered interventions, school psychologists may want to gather baseline data, create a dynamic assessment, and monitor the progress and effects of an intervention. To this end, we provide how-to sections on dynamic assessment or test-teach-test, can’t do–won’t do assessment, and figuring effect sizes. Finally, we suggest an instructional program that may be useful when school psychologists consult with educators who request resources for teaching English learners.

Oral Language Issues and Assessment of Oral Language

This chapter details formal and informal measures and methods of assessing oral language proficiency in students’ first and second languages. An assessment of students’ oral proficiency in their first language should be made before administering measures of achievement, cognitive processing, and intelligence. Typically, speech-language pathologists take the lead in assessing oral language. However, psychologists must have an understanding of the issues so they can make determinations as to the reliability and validity of the measures they administer. For high-incidence languages, such as Spanish and French, there are standardized measures for assessing oral language proficiency. But even with Spanish and French, whereas it is reasonable to administer and interpret standardized tests when recent immigrants are assessed in their first language, it is not appropriate to administer those measures after a child has been immersed in the second language for 2 or more years because of first language attrition. Evaluation teams are often reluctant to assess children who have not yet had time to become proficient in English. However, this is discriminatory toward English learners with disabilities. In many cases, informal measures of gathering data about oral language proficiency in the first language must be employed. We detail sources of information that help determine oral language proficiency in the first language and in English, such as home language surveys and tests that are administered by English as a second language (ESL) teachers.

Dual-Language Learner Development

Much has been discovered through brain imaging studies in the past few decades about how we learn to speak, understand, read, and write different languages. This chapter focuses on how the brain learns both first and second languages, as well as how the bilingual brain is different from the monolingual brain. It explores learning to speak and understand oral language versus learning to read and write. Dual-language learners are a heterogeneous group and, within that heterogeneity, their language learning is dependent upon cognitive, affective, and sociocultural factors as well as individual educational opportunities. We review the stages of language acquisition and how learning English as a second language interacts with the student’s first language. We talk about the differences between vocabulary that is learned and used at home versus language learned in academic settings. We explain how some second language learners become trapped in early stages of language acquisition because they have a language-based learning disability. When this happens, it can be challenging for school psychologists and other educational professionals to make special education eligibility decisions. A thorough understanding of the language acquisition process, provided in this chapter, lays the groundwork for such decisions.

Data Collection When Working with English Learners

In this chapter, we clarify best practices that generally apply in psychoeducational evaluations of English learners. When a school psychologist evaluates a child, he or she must collect data by means of record reviews, observations, interviews, and tests. The data must encompass the learner, curriculum, instruction, and the learner’s environment. For English learners, the data may be more complex, extensive, and difficult to unearth. The student’s English as a second language (ESL) teachers must be consulted in addition to regular classroom teachers. Interpreters and/or translators may need to become involved. The psychologist must investigate the expectations typically held in the child’s culture and how behaviors that are considered abnormal in the educator’s culture might be considered normal in the child’s culture. It is necessary to determine proficiency in the child’s first and subsequent languages in addition to the child’s other academic skills. Examiners must determine when it is appropriate to assess in the first language as well as in English. Assessments with reduced language demands should be chosen if the child has limited English proficiency and there may need to be more of a reliance on detailed observations, interviews, and rating scales than on standardized tests. We specify the guidelines to use in selecting tests to use with English learners. We explore interventions and instructional practices that are appropriate for students with limited English proficiency.

The Challenges of Assessing and Intervening with English Learners

For school psychologists in the USA and Canada, skills in assessing and intervening with English language learners have not kept pace with the rapid growth of numbers of these children over the past few decades. At least one in five public school children in the USA and Canada speaks a language other than English at home, yet many psychologists lack graduate coursework and/or on-the-job training in working with these children and may actually avoid working with them. Several issues distinguish working with children whose only language is English from those who are dual-language learners. Children who lack proficiency in English may not fit the norming samples of the standardized tests that school psychologists rely on in their evaluations, thus rendering scores invalid. Psychologists and other educators may lack understanding of cultural and linguistic issues that are faced by these children and their families. In this chapter, we raise the reader’s awareness of the issues that make assessments and interventions different for English learners than for fluent English speakers. We specify the areas to investigate when any student struggles: curriculum, instruction, environment, and the learner. We compare English learners with fluent English speakers in their typical paths to a comprehensive evaluation. We look at English learners’ needs regarding Response to Intervention or the Multi-Tiered Support System, development of interventions, and involvement of a problem-solving team. The chapter ends with a summary of elements needed in schools and districts to help make special education eligibility decisions for English learners.

Word Reading and Decoding

For individuals to learn to read, the brain must encode and decode incoming visual and auditory information, making use of previously learned procedural information about how to process stimuli. Attention, motivation, emotions, and adequate sleep all play roles in helping the brain learn to read. A sense of print and phonemic and morphemic awareness are necessary to learn to decode words. Children must have an adequate working memory, and an awareness of the sounds, or phonology, of a language. They must map those phonemes onto specific graphemes, which are made up of individual letters or combinations of letters. This matchup between sounds and letters is called a language’s orthography. Some languages—such as Spanish, Greek, and Italian—have regular orthographies and learning to read them takes a few months. Others—such as English—have irregular orthographies and take a few years to learn. Some educators believe that a child who can read a language with a regular orthography does not have a specific learning disability; however, this is not the case. There are differences related to learning to read in languages with different orthographies. This chapter highlights the clinical signs of decoding and word recognition disabilities, as well as appropriate formal and informal measures to use in assessing the reading of English learners. We focus on specific ways to assess reading decoding and word recognition as a part of specific learning disability identification eligibility decisions. The chapter concludes with interventions that can be put into place with English learners who struggle with decoding.

Reading Fluency and Vocabulary

Fluency in reading is a necessary bridge between decoding and comprehension. There is a strong relationship between students’ knowledge of vocabulary and their reading fluency. A lack of English vocabulary can present a challenge to educators who are attempting to teach English learners at their instructional level. Educators must understand the differences between the English of the classroom (cognitive academic language proficiency) and the language that is used outside of the classroom (basic interpersonal communication skills). Children with reading disabilities may have sufficient vocabulary knowledge to understand a text and may be able to decode but they do so in a slow, laborious manner. Students may have a problem with rapid automatic naming—or other cognitive correlates of reading fluency—difficulties that can exist despite the orthography of the language being learned. We explore the clinical signs of fluency disorders and the steps that can be taken to appropriately assess the reading fluency of English learners. We end with characteristics of good classroom instruction for English learners and interventions that can be put into place to help students improve their vocabulary and reading fluency.