Bilingual Language Sample Checklist

In-depth language samples continue to be the best tools for evaluating bilingual students. Language samples prove to be not culturally or racially biased and is considered the gold standard for assessing children’s language skills because it is the only assessment measure that captures a speaker’s typical and functional language use (Heilmann et al. 2010).

 This is a thorough bilingual language sample checklist will allow you to gather a language sample in both languages and analyze/compare specific morphological features in both Spanish & English side-by-side.

 The checklist includes a side-by-side comparison of grammatical forms that exist in both Spanish and English as well as a checklist for story grammar elements, MLU(words) and sentence structure, intelligibility and a section for other concerns.

 In addition, this checklist includes 2 charts with normative data on the acquisition of morphological and syntactical norms in monolingual Spanish-speakers AND Bilingual Spanish-speakers. Sources are cited within the resource. This is a great tool to refer to once you have gathered all of the information from the student's language sample.