Evaluating Emergent Bilinguals for Specific Learning Disabilities: Considering Second Language Development and Culture

Evaluating students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (i.e., emergent bilinguals) presents challenges to evaluation teams, as distinguishing between a language disorder and typical second language development is more complex. The skills and knowledge required to do this task often exceed the level of training that evaluators (e.g., educational diagnosticians, LSSPs, speech pathologists) possess. To conduct a nondiscriminatory evaluation, evaluators must determine native language proficiency to select tests, understand the impact of culture on the learner, and interpret results. This requires an understanding of typical second language development and the influence of culture. This paper aims to add to evaluators’ knowledge base by describing typical second language development and considering cultural implications. Implications for test selection and interpretation will also be discussed.