Identification, Classification, and Treatment of Reading and Language Disabilities in Spanish-Speaking EL Students: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on Identification, Classification, and Treatment of Reading and Language Disabilities in Spanish-speaking English Learners. The article explains the driving forces behind the need for the special issue, the global nature of linguistic diversity, and provides an overview of the five papers that comprise the special issue.

Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) are a growing and heterogeneous population of interest and importance to the United States. A growing body of research (Anthony et al., 2009; Hammer, Lawrence, & Miccio, 2007; Oller & Eilers, 2002; Páez, Tabors, & López, 2007; Tabors, Paez, & Lopez, 2003) shows that a variety of factors are associated with the developmental and academic outcomes of ELs. These factors include age of acquisition of each language, simultaneous or sequential bilingualism, the generation of immigration of the child and parent(s), degree and quality of input in each language, socioeconomic status, parental education level, and language of instruction in academic programs, among others (Hammer et al., 2014). Clearly, this heterogeneity makes the study of the language and literacy skills of ELs a complex enterprise.

The issue of disability identification within non-native speakers of a societal language is not unique to the United States. Indeed, the linguistic diversity of societies is increasing across the globe in the twenty-first century, such that all developed countries experience some degree of linguistic diversity among their populations. International assessment programs are one source of information on the linguistic diversity of public school settings. While data from these programs rarely speak directly to the issue of language minority status, the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) did include a single dichotomous indicator of whether or not the societal language was spoken in the home, in addition to information on being foreign born, or having foreign-born parents. In the report on PISA 2015 (OECD, 2016), the percentage of foreign-born students participating in PISA was reported to have grown from 9.4% to 12.5% between 2006 and 2015, with growth in both first-generation (4.5% to 5.4%) and second-generation (5.0% to 7.1%) immigrant students. Language minority status became available for reporting in 2015; among first-generation immigrants, 67% spoke a language other than the language of the assessment at home, whereas among second-generation immigrants, 44.7% spoke a language other than the language of the assessment at home. Just as it is clear that the education of language minorities is not unique to the U.S. context, it is equally clear that countries vary in the percentage of foreign-born and language minority students in their school systems, and in their success in equalizing educational outcomes for these students (della Chiesa, Scott, & Hinton, 2012; OECD, 2016). Also consistent with U.S. data, language minority students and students who are first- or second-generation immigrants in PISA tend to be disadvantaged socio-economically and tend to score more poorly on these international assessments of reading, math, and science.

Regardless of the many factors that contribute to the achievement gap for language minority students, a critical step in closing the achievement gap with their language majority peers is to better understand expected levels of performance and rates of progress with respect to oral language and reading skills in both L1 and L2 and how these expectations are influenced by instructional programs and other contextual characteristics during the early school years. Establishing such expectancies is essential, in part because normative information from monolingual speakers of the societal language are unhelpful in determining atypical development due to disability among language minorities, but also because early language and literacy skills are highly predictive of later reading abilities and academic achievement (Halle, Hair, Wandener, McNamara, & Chien, 2012; Han, 2012, Miller et al., 2006). To be comprehensive, this characterization of expected performance must take into account the variance in oral language and reading skills within English and the native language.

There is an urgent need to better understand the oral language and literacy development of ELs in order to develop a theoretically grounded framework for defining reading and language disabilities and to empirically determine those factors that impact the processes of identification, classification, and treatment in this educationally at-risk population. Currently, approaches to identification do not systematically distinguish between monolingual English speakers and ELs, allowing the same approaches to be used and offering little guidance on how approaches should be adjusted depending on the learner’s status as an EL. Here we can speak only to the U.S. context, in so far as the allowable processes for identification of disabilities in non-native speakers of the societal language are not well-known outside the United States, whereas federal law in the United States specifically addresses the issue of disability identification among ELs. Granted, simply addressing the issue is not a solution, and the identification of disabilities among ELs remains a challenge in the United States because there are few empirical investigations of the adequacy of current approaches, and no large-scale studies exist that consider how the performance of various criteria might be moderated by instructional contexts. Given the central importance of adequate opportunity to learn in the very definition of disabilities (Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2019), the role of instructional context on identification cannot be overlooked, especially given the heterogeneity of instructional contexts for ELs.

In addition to examining the challenges associated with the identification of disabilities among Spanish-speaking ELs, and by extension, language minority students learning to read an alphabetic societal language in other societal contexts, the papers in this volume seek to establish a theoretically and empirically defensible approach to these challenges. The series of studies seeks to compare and contrast different disability identification and classification methods (i.e., IQ-achievement discrepancy, low achievement, and growth patterns) and to examine student and contextual factors that might moderate the performance of these identification approaches. One key dimension explored involves the impact of the language of academic instruction on this systematic characterization. The results of these studies are expected to provide an empirical basis for a theoretically grounded framework for the identification and classification of learning disabilities in students growing up in the United States whose first language is not English.

The first paper in the issue (Francis et al., 2019) provides the theoretical framework for the volume by examining the literature on disability identification. The authors analyze a large-scale longitudinal dataset to systematically characterize and describe the development of oral language and reading from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of second grade for Spanish-speaking ELs, considering a range of factors that may contribute to that characterization and its relation to academic performance. Their objective is to identify those sources of variability in student performance that potentially complicate the process of disability identification among these students. This first study also introduces the methodological commonalities across the five articles of the volume by describing the large-scale longitudinal dataset used in the first four studies. The second empirical article (Rojas et al., 2019) uses a subset of the data to build upon the first study by investigating why some Spanish-speaking ELs lag behind others in their bilingual literacy skills at the end of second grade across specific programs of language instruction. This study uses longitudinal data from kindergarten to second grade in English and Spanish to predict which ELs are likely to demonstrate literacy-based difficulties by investigating their oral language and literacy outcomes over time.

The third empirical article (Khalaf et al., 2019) investigates the dimensionality of phonological awareness among Spanish-speaking ELs aimed at establishing whether phonological awareness is a unidimensional construct across the languages or a multidimensional construct unique to the language in which it is measured. The authors explore possible ways of modeling nested data at the student- and or classroom-levels. This paper addresses essential measurement issues in the identification of reading problems among ELs, while isolating important sources of variability in student performance that confound the identification process.

The fourth empirical article (Santi et al., 2019) explores the validity of IQ-achievement discrepancy as a criterion for the identification of disabilities in Spanish-speaking ELs and examines the factors that moderate the validity of discrepancy as a basis for identification. While this approach to disability identification has been widely criticized (Fletcher et al., 2019), it remains one of several approaches that are allowable under U.S. federal law, and continues to be widely used in practice. As such, it is allowed to be used with ELs, but is poorly understood and is grossly understudied empirically with this population. Santi et al. attempt to address this shortcoming in the literature, outlining some of the unique complications that arise when applying discrepancy identification with ELs.

The final article in the volume, Hall, Steinle, & Vaughn (2019), focuses on the issue of treatment and instruction by summarizing the critical findings from each of four reviews of research addressing the effects of (a) academic language and/or reading interventions (August & Siegel, 2006; Klingner, Artiles, & Barletta, 2006; Richards-Tutor, Baker, Gersten, Baker, & Smith, 2016; Rivera, Moughamian, Lesaux, & Francis, 2008) and (b) writing interventions (August & Siegel, 2006) on reading and writing outcomes. The goal of this article is to identify common findings, converging instructional principles, gaps in the research, and remaining challenges that prevent the identification of appropriate instruction for ELs with LD (August & Shanahan, 2006).

In addition to the five empirical articles, Dr. Nonie Lesaux, an internationally renowned scholar with expertise in both learning disabilities and English learners’ language and reading development, provides a valuable commentary. Dr. Lesaux brings an important international and developmental perspective to the issues that are surfaced throughout the volume, and challenges us to continue to push for solutions to effective identification and targeted supports to ensure opportunities to learn for all students.

Developing an empirically supported theoretical framework for the identification and classification of reading and language disabilities among Spanish-speaking ELs requires that we consider the different contexts in which these students are learning to read. Language theory and current theory on disabilities would dictate that a child with a reading disability would manifest evidence of that disability in any language in which that child learns to read (Wagner, Francis, & Morris, 2005; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). A parallel argument can be made for language disabilities manifesting themselves in all languages that the child learns to speak. These assumptions imply that information from both the child’s L1 and their L2 carry information about the presence or absence of disability. However, because educational and experiential histories are uneven as they relate to societal and non-societal languages, precisely how information about disability is carried in the two languages and how it might be leveraged to aid in identification is murky, at best, and will only become clear through careful collection and examination of longitudinal data.

It is our hope that the papers in this volume will begin to address this hole in the literature. While the contexts that we examine are those present in the United States and experienced by Spanish-speaking ELs, the generality of our work is clear because these contexts are not completely unlike the contexts for non-Spanish-speaking ELs in the United States, nor the educational contexts of language minority students in other countries that have resulted from the transnational flows of people throughout the developed world. Despite the substantial numbers of language minority students attending schools throughout the developed world and laws protecting the rights of students with disabilities, there is remarkably little empirical research to support practice on identifying disabilities in these students. The papers in this volume begin to scratch the surface of this complex and growing challenge. Although much work remains to be done, it is imperative that practice be informed by research and that the large body of research on disability identification among language majority students be replicated and extended to the growing population of language minority students.

As instructional practice with language minority students continues to evolve and improve, expectations for students’ development will also require adjustment over time. Thus, in many respects, the works presented here represent first steps on a long journey, but one for which it is imperative to begin immediately. In so far as work of this type has proven useful in the study of disability identification among language majority students, we are optimistic that it will prove useful for advancing research on disability identification in language minority students, as well.

Biography

DAVID J. FRANCIS, PHD, is Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston and director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics. Dr. Francis’ areas of quantitative interest include modeling of individual growth, multilevel and mixture modeling, structural equation modeling, item response theory, and exploratory data analysis. His substantive interests focus on the problems of identification, classification, and treatment of disabilities and factors affecting language and literacy development, particularly in at-risk populations.