The Zhuang language test ("Vahcuengh Sawcuengh Suijbingz Gaujsi", VSSG) is the first minority language test in the People's Republic of China. It was designed with multiple goals including improving Zhuang language teaching, recruiting students for relevant majors of tertiary study, identifying proficiency for work-related applications,…

This commentary highlights major validation challenges raised, explicitly or implicitly, from the four articles in the special issue on "Validity Considerations for Assessing Language Proficiency in Young Language Minority Students." They are concerned with: (1) the construct definition in consideration of young language-minority (LM)…

Young Indigenous students with a language background of emergent, unrecognised, and/or non-prestigious contact languages are commonly by-passed as English language learners (ELLs). Consequently, they are taught and assessed via undifferentiated mainstream pedagogy and testing, generally characterised by reported underachievement. Long-term social…

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers two English as a second language (ESL) programs for students whose native language is not English and who need to develop and enhance their English language skills (English Learners, or ELs). The Content-Based ESL model (CB-ESL) consists of an intensive program of English instruction in all…

The Houston Independent School District offers two different English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for language minority students. One of these is a Content-Based ESL program where ESL methodology is used to deliver English instruction across a variety of subject areas. The second is a Pullout ESL program where students attend special…

The Houston Independent School District offers two different English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for language minority students. One of these is a Content-Based ESL (CBESL) program where ESL methodology is used to deliver English instruction across a variety of subject areas. The second is a Pullout ESL program (PO-ESL) where students…

The Houston Independent School District offers two different English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for language minority students. One of these is a Content-Based ESL program where ESL methodology is used to deliver English instruction across a variety of subject areas. The second is a Pullout ESL program where students attend special…

Global efforts for standards-based linguistic assessment increasingly hold that examinees should be tested in the language with which they are most familiar. Yet, language use still occurs differently from its characterization in exams, even as exams are increasingly developed in historically minoritized languages. Drawing from two years of…

Despite acknowledgment that language-minority children come from a wide variety of home language backgrounds and have a wide range of proficiency in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages, it is unknown whether differences across language-minority children in relative and absolute levels of proficiency in L1 and L2 predict subsequent…

This study investigates the effect of bilingualism on learning English as a foreign language (L3), examining the impact of manner and sequence of bilingual acquisition and learning as well as language use practices in language minority children. With a sample of 1295 German eighth and ninth graders (bilingual: n = 456, monolingual: n = 839), we…

The aim of this descriptive statewide study is to decipher reclassification practices in California -- the state that educates 20% of the nation's English language learners (ELL) and enrolls more language-minority students than any other state in the union. In the course of our investigation, we examined reclassification criteria from a…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

In large-scale assessment studies, language minority students typically obtain lower test scores in mathematics than native speakers. Although this performance difference was related to the linguistic complexity of test items in some studies, other studies did not find linguistically demanding math items to be disproportionally more difficult for…

We investigated general vocabulary and academic vocabulary growth trajectories of adolescent language minority students using an individual growth modeling approach. Our analytical sample included 3161 sixth- to eighth-grade students from an urban school district in California. The language minority students in our sample were classified as…

In this study, we examined the bilingual language development among Korean American first-graders in two southern California cities and explored the opportunities for language use available to them in various spaces: at school (one dual language immersion school and one traditional English-only public school), at home, and in the community. Data…