Spanish heritage bilinguals growing up in the United States experience positive academic and linguistic outcomes from receiving instruction in both of their languages (Serafini, Rozell & Winsler, 2022). Unlike English-only education, dual-language (DL) immersion programs provide important benefits to heritage speakers by sustaining their bilingualism and continued growth in Spanish. In addition, Spanish heritage speakers enrolled in dual language programs in the U.S. have been found to score higher on standardized assessments of English language literacy than peers in monolingual schools (Acosta, Williams & Hunt, 2019). In contrast, being educated only in English accelerates attrition in the Spanish of heritage speakers (Montrul, 2016). Considerably less is known about the Spanish linguistic outcomes of heritage speakers who attend DL programs, highlighting the need for assessments designed to measure heritage bilingual development (García & Kleifgen, 2018).
Current bilingual assessments measure language disorders (e.g., the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment, Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2018) or second language acquisition (e.g.the STAMP 4S, Santos, 2019). Therefore, they are not optimized to capture heritage bilinguals' linguistic talents. In the case of heritage Spanish in American schools, assessments must also be capable of evaluating large, heterogeneous populations of bilingual children (Valdés, 2018). In our presentation we offer recommendations for constructing research-based instruments that can address the gap in knowledge of how heritage speaking children acquire Spanish through DL. First, we advocate for targeting specific linguistic structures that have proven difficult for bilingual populations. Additionally, we propose that production and comprehension must be addressed separately and the use of multiple types of tasks. We also address the importance of lexical frequency in constructing test items . Finally, we advocate for allowing heritage bilingual students to use translanguaging when completing oral and written assessments, sharing examples from young heritage speakers of Spanish enrolled in DL schools.
References
Acosta, J., Williams, J., and Hunt, B. (2019). Dual Language Program Models and English Language Learners: An Analysis of the Literacy Results from a 50/50 and a 90/10 Model in Two California Schools. Journal of Educational Issues 5 (2): 1. https://doi.org/10.5296/jei.v5i2.14747.
Carreira, M., & Kagan, O. (2018). Heritage language education: A proposal for the next 50 years. Foreign Language Annals, 51(1), 152–168. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12331
García, O., & Kleifgen, J. (2018). Educating emergent bilinguals: Policies, programs, and practices for English learners. Teachers College Press.
Montrul, S. (2016). The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge University Press.
Peña, E. D., Gutiérrez-Clellen, V. F., Iglesias, A., Goldstein, B. A., & Bedore, L. M. (2018).
Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA). Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
Serafini, E., Rozell, N., & Winsler, A. (2022). Academic and English language outcomes for DLLs as a function of school bilingual education model: the role of two-way immersion and home language support. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 25(2), 552-570.
Valdés, G. (2018). Analyzing the curricularization of language in two-way immersion education: Restating two cautionary notes. Bilingual Research Journal, 41(4), 388-412.
