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Cross-Disciplinary Academic Language Proficiency in Spanish-Speaking Chilean Students: Designing and Piloting an Innovative Instrument

Sat, April 9, 8:15 to 9:45am, Convention Center, Floor: Level One, Room 153

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical framework
Academic language proficiency is increasingly considered an important factor influencing content-area reading and learning. Guided by prior research, recent efforts have operationalized the CALS construct and have designed an instrument to measure CALS in English (Uccelli et al, 2014; Uccelli et al. 2015). This study builds on prior CALS research with the goal of designing a linguistically and culturally valid instrument --comparable to the English CALS Instrument-- to measure Spanish CALS in upper elementary and middle school Chilean students.
So far, only minimal research has explored pre-adolescents and adolescents' academic language proficiency in Spanish. In this study, we test the hypothesis that in Spanish many struggling readers might face similar academic language challenges as those documented previously for English, e.g., information density, logical connectives, argumentative text structures (Snow & Uccelli, 2009).

Methods
A total of 810 4th-to-8th students attending three urban schools in Santiago (Chile) participated. The sample was relatively balanced by grade (4th=163, 5th=173, 6th=165, 7th=155, 8th=154) and by gender (56% female). All students were native Spanish speakers.
Four assessments were administered:
(1) Evaluación de Lenguaje Académico (ELA | Spanish-CALS): group-administered instrument adapted from the English version for measuring CALS in Spanish. After an iterative process of item design, 141 items --organized in 9 tasks (connectives, morphology, syntax, text structure, academic vocabulary, epistemic markers, conceptual anaphora, metalinguistic vocabulary and awareness)-- were administered in the pilot testing phase.
(2) Reading comprehension. PROLEC-SE (α = .70): standardized assessment of reading comprehension (Ramos & Cuetos, 2011). This test includes two explanatory passages and 20 open-ended questions with standardized scoring guidelines.
(3) Vocabulary. CEDETI Vocabulary test (α = .87): includes 32 items. Each item includes a target word and four words around it. Students are asked to identify the two semantically connected words for each item.
(4) Reading Fluency. Rapid Word Segmentation Task (RWS)- Spanish (López-Escribano et al, 2013): test of silent word reading fluency in which students need to identify word boundaries in a string of three words connected without spaces. The score corresponds to the number of words correctly segmented in 90 seconds.


Results
Theoretical criteria and IRT analyses guided the selection of the final ELA set of 67 items, organized in 9 tasks (α = .91). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that all tasks loaded onto a single factor. Subsequently, descriptive statistics of the ELA Final Set revealed considerable within- and across-grade variability in Chilean adolescents' CALS, with progressively higher performances in the later grades (4th M=29.43; 5th M=34.86; 6th M=42.92; 7th M=47.12; 8th M=50.68; M=40.76, SD=16.8). The correlation between Spanish CALS and reading comprehension was moderate to strong (0.79).

Significance
This study is unprecedented as it presents a theoretically and psychometrically robust instrument to assess CALS in Spanish-speaking 4th-to-8th-grade students. Given the low reading comprehension achievement of students in the region, this instrument is promising for Spanish-speaking students throughout Latin America. These results begin to provide evidence to support to the applicability of similar Core-Academic Language Skills construct and instruments across languages.

Authors