Advancing Bilingual Special Education: Translanguaging in Content-Based Story Retells for Distinguishing Language Difference from Disability

Abstract

Abstract Many existing assessments for deciding the potential special education needs of emergent bilingual youth are either normed on monolingual students or normed on bilingual students through monolingual data collection (Hamayan, Marler, Sánchez-López, & Damico, 2013; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015; Perkins, 2005). To address this issue, we describe a recent study using translanguaging in dynamic assessment with six middle school emergent bilingual youth. Using bilingual language sample analysis of content-based story retells, coded with the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software, we demonstrate how emergent bilingual youth are able to produce more language and content knowledge when given the freedom to translanguage. These quantitative data may improve decisions distinguishing language difference from disability and address issues of disproportionality in special education.

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