Diagnostic identification of language and reading disorders among bilingual learners

A major problem in research and practice is that bilingual students in the U.S. are often misidentified having language and reading disorders. Both over- and under-diagnosis of disorders have serious consequences, including long-term reading difficulty and potential high school dropout. This highlights a critical need for valid,

accurate diagnostic protocols to reliably identify language and reading disorders among young bilingual learners. Consequently, the long-term goal of the proposed research is to establish practical, accurate diagnostic protocols for identifying language and reading disorders among bilingual learners early in children’s development.

Representing the next step toward this goal, the overall objective of this project is to generate assessment protocols that have evidence of reliability and validity for identifying language and/or reading disorders among Spanish-English bilingual learners in kindergarten to 2nd grade. Through annual assessments of children’s

decoding and linguistic comprehension skills in Spanish and English, we will integrate information from static bilingual assessment, learning-based dynamic assessment, and parent/teacher report to identify accurate, reliable markers of language and reading disorders. Three specific aims will be addressed. First, we will develop

an empirically derived protocol to identify word reading difficulty (WRD; also, dyslexia) among Spanish-English bilingual children across kindergarten through second grade. Second, we will develop an empirically derived protocol to identify developmental language disorder (DLD) among Spanish-English bilingual children across

kindergarten through second grade. Third, we will identify how heterogeneity in reading ability influences links between word reading, oral language, and reading comprehension, measured continuously. This work is significant because it will substantially advance diagnostic practice for identifying language and word reading

disorders among bilingual learners, contributing to accurate diagnoses to prevent students from falling behind their peers during the early elementary years. Early identification of bilingual students likely to have difficulty in school allows educators to allocate specialized resources and individualized instruction to maximize gains for

those students. This work is innovative because it fills a critical need to establish classification protocols for both WRD and DLD with evidence of reliability and validity for young bilingual children, focuses on bilingual learners with a wide range of English and Spanish exposure, use, and proficiencies, and integrates cutting-edge dynamic

and static assessment procedures (including consideration of student responsiveness to intervention) to improve the reliability and validity of diagnostic classification, and considers language and reading development simultaneously to improve identification of subgroups of children with reading difficulty.