Education School Prof. Marcia Invernizzi and research scientist Karen Ford recently received a $1.6 million four-year grant to develop a reading assessment program for the increasing number of Spanish-speaking children in United States elementary schools.
The grant, provided by the National Center for Education Research with support from the Department of Education, will help the pair create a tool capable of identifying Spanish-speaking children who are at risk for reading difficulties, Invernizzi said.
“Previously, when you have a student who doesn’t speak English, or speaks it very well, and is having difficulty reading, you don’t know whether the problem is that they do not speak English or that they have difficulty with reading,” she said, adding that the future assessment tool should help teachers better understand this issue.
Invernizzi and Ford will work together to develop Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening español, a Spanish language version of an already existing assessment tool to determine reading difficulties in elementary school students. This tool will screen U.S. Spanish-speaking students — kindergarten through third grade — in their native language.
Throughout the next year, Ford and Invernizzi will develop tentative forms of the assessment. They will test phonological awareness — a student’s awareness of speech sounds, rhymes, and his ability to invent spellings for unknown words — and reading abilities.
Ford said she hopes that this program will prevent Spanish-speaking U.S. students from getting lost in the education system.
If “children are not reading well by third grade, the likelihood is that they will never catch up,” she said, noting that early identification and intervention is key.
Invernizzi said the pair is creating a new program because there would be too many linguistic elements to change in the existing test to make it applicable to Spanish-speaking children. In addition, Ford noted that screening tests used in Spain or Mexico cannot be used because most U.S. Spanish-speaking children are bilingual and living in an English-dominated culture.
“It would not be an equal assessment,” Invernizzi said.
PALS español also will be used for placement of Spanish-speaking children when they first enter school systems, Invernizzi said.
Invernizzi and Ford plan to begin testing the assessment tool in 10 different school divisions in Virginia and in several other school divisions nationwide by 2010, Ford said.
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