A pilot program which would allow teachers to assess the literacy skills of Spanish-speaking students is set to begin field testing this fall in the Curry School of Education.
PALS, or Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening, is an assessment used by teachers to gauge the English language comprehension of children in kindergarten through third grade. It is currently implemented in six different countries, over 40 states in the U.S., and all elementary schools in the Commonwealth.
"It builds on a [state-] legislated educational initiative -- the Early Intervention Reading Initiative," said Education Prof. Marcia Invernizzi, one of the authors of the PALS assessment. "That initiative is a funded initiative that provides incentive funding to schools that screen all children in grades K-3 and provide additional help to any children that are behind in their literacy development."
Over the years, however, the large increase of Spanish-speaking students within elementary schools has prompted the PALS program to create a new version of the assessment that would allow teachers to assess these students' language comprehension using their native tongue.
"The problem that has arisen is that we have so many children that don't speak English well enough to have their literacy screened in English, but that doesn't mean they don't know quite a bit about reading or writing in their native languages," Invernizzi said.
With the help of Karen Ford, a bilingual reading researcher and Education professor, PALS Espãnol is currently undergoing field testing in schools across the country including several in Colorado, Texas, New York, Oklahoma, Kansas and Rhode Island.
According to Invernizzi, PALS Espãnol aims to do the same thing as the English PALS program, but would allow teachers to evaluate children using the Spanish language rather than English.
"Let's say [a child has] no reading ability in English, you don't know whether they can read in Spanish or not, but if you knew that ... if you knew what they knew, you could build on that and they could transfer that knowledge to English much more quickly," Invernizzi said.
According to Vivian Polo, Literacy Specialist at Greer Elementary School of Albemarle County, the English PALS program is a useful tool for teachers.
"It's a valid and reliable assessment," she said. "It effectively gives you the information you need for early literacy skills."
Polo added that if the PALS Espãnol program did become available Greer Elementary would use it.
"At Greer we have many languages -- I believe we have 36," she said. "So for those who spoke Spanish or came from Spanish-speaking homes we would use it."
Invernizzi said she hopes to complete testing of the PALS Espãnol program this year.
"Hopefully this year I'll be able to complete it," she said. "Right now I'm looking for funding, because once I get things finalized in terms of the actual items and so forth, I need to do a national sample that represents all the demographic categories."
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