The Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) was developed in
response to the need for valid, reliable instruments for assessment
of speech and language ability, along a continuum, in
English-Spanish bilingual children ages 4 through 6 years. The BESA
is a comprehensive assessment of a child's speech and language
abilities in English and Spanish. Two ancillary questionnaires
(BIOS and ITALK) can be used to document language exposure and use,
allowing the examiner to develop a profile of any parent and
teacher concerns. BESA subtests address the domains of phonology,
morphosyntax, and semantics separately for both Spanish and
English. There are three standardized and norm-referenced subtests
addressing language ability, and one criterion-referenced activity
allowing observation of pragmatic language. Administration time
varies depending on whether or not both languages are tested and
which subtests are included. Administration takes between one hour
(for one language) and two hours (for both languages). The BIOS is
typically completed as part of an interview by the examiner. In
this survey, parents are asked about the language exposure history
of the child. This information helps the examiner know when and in
what context each of the child's two languages were used on a
year-to-year basis. In addition, parents and teachers are asked
what language the child hears and uses during a typical school day,
and during a typical weekend day on an hour-by-hour basis. This
information provides clinicians with information about relative use
and exposure to each language and can help guide whether to test
children in Spanish, English, or both. The parent survey
(BIOS-Home) takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete; the teacher survey
(BIOS-School) can be completed in 5 to 10 minutes. The ITALK is
completed by the examiner as a parent and teacher interview. The
ITALK items address relative use of a child's two languages and
five areas of speech and language development in Spanish and
English (vocabulary, grammar, sentence production, comprehension,
and phonology). Parents and teachers are asked to identify the
perceived level of the child's performance in each language. This
inventory provides a brief indicator of relative language use. It
also provides a description of parent and teacher concern and can
be used to guide development of the assessment strategy. Results of
the inventory can be used to interpret diagnostic results from BESA
or other language tests. The ITALK can be completed in 10 minutes
or less. The Pragmatics activity is based on Fey's (1986) model of
assertiveness and responsiveness. In an interactive format,
children are asked to "help wrap a present" with the examiner.
Through this realistic situation, obligatory contexts are set up to
elicit different assertive and responsive acts. The Pragmatics
activity utilizes English, Spanish, or both languages together (via
code-switching) depending on the child's preferred language of
interaction. The activity should be used to identify children who
may encounter difficulties in situations that require the children
to be active participants (e.g., classroom). If administered at the
beginning of a battery of tests, the Pragmatics activity provides
an excellent opportunity to establish rapport with the child and
will also provide clinicians with an indication of how
collaborative and interactive the child will be during the rest of
the assessment. This activity takes 5-10 minutes to complete. The
Phonology subtest is a single-word phonological assessment designed
primarily to differentially diagnose typical from atypical
phonological skills in Spanish-English bilingual children. Analyses
are also included that allow the examiner to profile the
phonological skills in these children. The assessment includes two
measures. The Spanish measure assesses phonological production
using 28 Spanish words. The English measure assesses phonological
production using 31 English words. The Phonology subtest takes 10
to 15 minutes to administer in each language, depending on the
individual child (20 to 30 minutes total). The Morphosyntax subtest
employs cloze and sentence repetition tasks to target grammatical
morphemes and sentence structures that were predicted to be
difficult for children with language impairment in English or
Spanish. Forms tested in English include plural -s, possessive -s,
past and present tense, third-person singular, progressives,
copulas, auxiliary do negatives, and passives, as well as complex
verb forms, conjunctions, and embedded prepositions and noun
phrases. The English Morphosyntax Subtest has 24 cloze items and 9
sentence repetitions items. Forms tested in Spanish include
articles, progressives, clitics, subjunctives, preterite, complex
verb forms, and conjunctions. The Spanish Morphosyntax Subtest has
15 cloze items and 10 sentence repetitions items. For each
language, a grammatical cloze subscore, a sentence repetition
subscore, and a total score that is a composite of those two are
derived. The morphosyntax test takes approximately 15 minutes to
administer in each language (30 minutes total). The Semantics
subtest targets six tasks: analogies, characteristic properties,
categorization, functions, linguistic concepts, and similarities
and differences. These six item types were based on the literature
describing acquisition of semantic breadth and depth in order to
tap into how children organize and access their lexical system
(Pena, Bedore, & Rappazzo, 2003). The English Semantics subtest
has a total of 25 items: 10 receptive and 15 expressive. The
Spanish Semantics subtest also has 25 items, 12 receptive and 13
expressive. Scoring allows for code-mixing-giving children credit
for a correct response in either language. Subscores are provided
for semantics receptive and semantics expressive, as well as a
total semantics score for each language. The Semantics subtest
takes about 15 minutes to administer in each language (30 minutes
total). The BESA is designed to be used with children who speak
English, Spanish, or both languages. The BESA subtests are
psychometrically sound and yield scaled and standard scores for
each of the domain tests (phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics).
The questionnaires provide criterion-based guidelines to determine
language(s) of testing and to develop an assessment strategy. The
tests can be used together for a complete speech and language
battery or the examiner may select tests specific to the diagnostic
question. Presently, the test is appropriate for children between
the ages of 4;0 and 6;11. The BESA can be used (a) to identify
language impairment in bilingual and monolingual Latino children,
(b) to document progress in speech and language related to
intervention, (c) to document the dominant language in each domain
including morphosyntax, semantics, and phonology, and (d) in
research studies of bilingual children with and without language
impairment. The BESA is specifically designed to assess the speech
and language of English-Spanish bilingual children's two languages.
The primary use of the BESA is to identify phonological and/or
language impairment in bilingual and EL children via a standardized
protocol. The objective scores obtained on the BESA across three
domains can be used in combination with clinical observations,
language samples, as well as with other standardized measures to
identify children with speech and/or language impairment. Through
use of a combination of BESA subtests, clinicians can document
children's speech and language strengths and needs. A second use of
the BESA is to monitor children's progress in speech and language.
After initiation of a speech and language intervention program,
children's progress should be regularly documented. It is
recommended that daily probes be used to monitor children's
session-to-session progress. This information should be used to
make decisions about the direction of the intervention. The BESA is
sensitive to year-to-year changes in children's speech and language
growth and the particular language in which progress is being made.
Thus, in addition to the more sensitive measures of daily progress,
the BESA can be administered at broader intervals (e.g., annually
or semi-annually) to gauge progress in a specific program of
intervention, to document continued need for intervention, and to
document achievement of treatment goals for exiting services.
Documentation of a bilingual's dominant language is a challenge in
school settings. Many children who have exposure to more than one
language demonstrate mixed dominance, whereby they perform higher
in one language in one domain, but higher in the other language in
a different domain. It is therefore important to know what a
child's relative dominance is across different domains of speech
and language. This information can be useful for planning
intervention, as well as for planning educational programming for
bilingual children. Together, the BIOS-Home and BIOS-School provide
an objective measure of children's input and output of Spanish and
English. This information helps speech-language pathologists,
parents, teachers, and administrators know how much the child hears
and uses each language and in what contexts. This information is
independent of performance, which can be affected by child
characteristics such as language ability. In addition to the BIOS,
the Spanish and English standardized test scores can be compared
directly for phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics to determine a
child's best language for a particular domain. If children's
standard scores across domains are within 5 points of each other,
we consider them to be balanced. There are a number of ways that
the BESA subtests can be used in research. ITALK can be used to
gain parent and teacher observations about the child's performance
across five domains of speech and language in Spanish and English
as part of qualifying data for a study. BIOS can be used to
document weekly input and output in Spanish and English as a way of
grouping children by language experience and/or by year of first
exposure. For bilingual children with language impairment, BIOS
provides a measure that is independent of their test performance on
speech and language tasks. The three domain subtests can be used
together or independently to assess children's speech and language.
These can be used to qualify children for a study or to group
children by ability. As of this writing, the authors have conducted
and published several studies with the longer, experimental
versions of BESA subtests. In addition, researchers across the
country have used the experimental versions of BESA in studies of
bilingual Spanish-English speakers. Researchers in Spanish-speaking
countries are in the process of using the Spanish version of these
measures in research studies.
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