Spanish-English Bilingual Children’s Interactional Competence and Identities in Oral Language Assessments

• In Event: Teaching and Learning in Linguistically Diverse Settings

Abstract

Relatively little is known about how multilingual children discursively negotiate oral language assessment situations. Considering the key role of proficiency assessment in the education of and research on these young learners, a better understanding of how they interactionally accomplish language assessment performances is needed so that researchers and educators can support the development of not only their discrete linguistic skills but also their interactional competencies. The present study seeks to help address this need through discourse analyses of the ways 12 Spanish- English bilingual children draw on diverse resources as they participate in individual narrative-based assessments as part of a bilingual language development study. Findings are discussed with regard to implications for language assessment practices in both research and education.

Authors

• Meghan Corella Morales, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Jin-Sook Lee, University of California - Santa Barbara