Bilingual staff help differentiate typical language development from disability, but interviewees described no systematic process for doing so¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2023 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Bilingual teachers, SLPs, and psychologists were described as helping rule out language development as a factor, yet no systematic differentiation process was described. → Burr 2023

Evidence¶

Burr 2023¶

Burr, E., Burho, J., & Perez, A. (2023). Pre-Referral Processes in California State Preschool Programs: How Practitioners Decide to Refer Multilingual Children for Special Education Evaluation. WestEd. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED655866

q2 · i? · qualitative · r2

Interview study of CSPP coordinators. Bilingual SLPs and school psychologists could assess ML children in Spanish and in English; administrators assumed staff bilingualism includes understanding of typical and atypical multilingual development.

"Although interviewees highlighted the benefits of having bilingual staff, interviewees did not describe a systematic process for distinguishing typical second-language development from potential disability in the pre-referral process."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Multidisciplinary teams often provide home language support and delay referral to rule out lack of opportunity to learn before evaluating ML children — related
• Assuming conversational fluency indicates English proficiency has led to bilingual children being misdiagnosed as learning disabled or retarded and to premature exit from support programs — related
• CSPP pre-referral decisions draw on baseline data from the ASQ, ASQ:SE-2, and the DRDP administered twice per year — related
• CSPP pre-referral processes mirror the K-12 MTSS approach and apply fundamentally the same steps to ML and non-ML children — related
• Systems constraints on pre-referral include lack of appropriate observation tools, over-identification fears, and COVID-19 effects — related
• Assessment of young multilingual learners is hampered by a dearth of valid, linguistically appropriate measures and by English-only administration — related
• Learning behaviors of typical multilingual development can resemble those of disability, complicating accurate identification — related
• Multidisciplinary team collaboration is the most prominent theme in research on supports for multilingual learners with suspected disabilities — related
• Subgroup analyses indicate school staff identification and referral services and informal networks both contribute to learning-mode differences in children’s SSI applications — related