At the end of each spring semester, the measure of my success as a teacher is whether the students can answer the questions I ask in their oral's exams for the Masters degree. This year is different because we instated written exams instead of the orals. This is 10 hours of writing and 2 extra hours for the bilingual students in my program. It's hard for me to look at the anxiety and panic attacks that students exhibit during this time of their lives. But I'm usually pleased and try not to take things to personally when they have not really grasped the concepts or are not fluent in how they express their ideas. I guess I hope that with some time in the field that they'll be able to develop those argumentative and persuasive skills that are needed as a bilingual SLP.
As I teach in the classroom, I hope that the clinical practica will be a positive and supportive environment to bring together what the student has learned and needs to apply in clinic. Sometimes it doesn't work, either because of a supervisor assigned by the school district or because the student doesn't want to change the system just yet. The district assigns the supervisors. Sometimes the supervisor is bilingual and sometimes not. When the staff member isn't, either they're needing support because of a large caseload of Spanish speaking students or maybe because the clinician doesn't know what she's doing and needs to have a bilingual graduate student to monitor. I wanted to share one of the questions that I asked on the writtens and then parts of responses that were written by Carrie Slaymaker from Illinois and Patrick Walden from Florida. My purpose in sharing these responses is that I'm hoping that we as supervisors will continue or begin to learn from our students.
Questions:
You have completed a school practicum in the Public Schools. Describe the diagnostic procedures used at this site and then critique the system using Kayser's recommendations concerning assessment of bilingual populations. Provide strengths and weaknesses, changes that you would make, recommendations for the referral process, any changes.
Response:
#1 The SLP's in the district follow many of the recommendations that Kayser makes for assessing a bilingual child, yet they are not doing so always in an ideal fashion. It appears that this is not due to lack of concern for the child, but usually as secondary to time constraints. To begin, there needs to be more consistency with the language and articulation screening process. As I will mention in greater detail later, not everyone agrees on measures to use for screening and what denotes the need for further testing. Next, I would like to target the area I feel is most deficit, pre-IEP family interaction. As Kayser emphasizes, a tremendous deal of information including child language use at home, language use compared to siblings, language exposure experiences, developmental milestones, medical history, pre-para-perinatal information and more can usually be obtained by the parents. This is all valuable information, especially when looking at language differences vs. language disorder of the bilingual child and I feel it is not adequately covered with a parent questionnaire. The next area is standardized testing. As we all know, there are many limitations to standardized tests, especially for those that evaluate multilingual and multicultural children. In my experiences, I feel that the SLP's are cognizant of this and try to not focus solely on standard scores and percentile ranks, yet the school system itself still wants to see numbers. In the area of academic records I feel there are a number of areas where clinicians could further utilize information available to them. One way, obviously, is to review it and see what type of programming they have received thus far. This leads to the next area, not even all schools within the same district offer the same bilingual educational program. Therefore, one cannot assume of consistent program just because they have been in a bilingual education program throughout. They may have moved 7 times within 3 years. The final aspect I will critique is the teacher rating scales. These are done in place of student observations, and they often are biased or an incomplete profile of the child's communicative competency in the classroom. For example, I have sadly experienced teachers with the attitude of "what can I do to get this problem child out of my classroom?" Yet, their idea of a problem child is one with limited English proficiency and they (teacher) are incompetent to appropriately support and facilitate this child's language development. For this reason, I feel it is important to do an observation to get a more realistic understanding of performance.
The first aspect I will discuss is the need for the bilingual SLP and diagnostic team to agree on a theory of bilingual language development. Seeing as how everyone has a different "opinion" on this there is no continuity on referral processes, screening, assessment, nor treatment. This leads to severe problems especially when a child moves or is transitioned to another school. The second recommendation for change that desperately needs to occur is administrative and faculty education on the process of normally developing bilingual children. They need to be aware that it is different from the development of monolingual children but this does not signify a disorder. We, SLPs, receive many inappropriate referrals because of this. Also, we see many administrators and educators who are inappropriately fighting for SPED services when they are not warranted. Finally, my recommendation is to put more money into appropriate, regular bilingual educational programs instead of inappropriate special education programs make bilingualism, not transfer to monolingualism, a positive goal!
#2 The SLP with whom I worked knew nothing about bilingual assessment and thought that it was unnecessary at the middle school level. When I asked her why this student was not to receive testing in Spanish as well, she stated that he didn't receive services in Spanish so there was no reason to test him in Spanish. I however, insisted and she allowed me the time to test the student in his home language. In fact, in a conversation with the student, I found out that all of his relatives, except his parents, live in Mexico and he travels back and forth often.
It is necessary to test a child in both languages in order to make nonbiased diagnostic decisions. This recommendation appeals to the inherent logic that in order to make decisions about a child's language abilities, one needs a whole picture of their language. A clinician can only do that by taking a look at both linguistic systems, as both are part of the child's communication. Also, I feel that the lack of case history gathering during the diagnostic process was a weakness. If I had not asked the child about his family, I would have never known that Spanish played such an important role in his family. This information is crucial to making diagnostic decisions.
