Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment How do you test bilingual kids?

I'm almost clueless with testing, how can you test kids who are bilingual? If I understand correctly language skills have a huge role in testing as they are tested but might affect also how well child understands the questions. Are some tests better for it than others?

We likely will never be able to test our DD. She is way too young now and later we probably move to a country where IQ tests are not done for these purposes. Even if we would stay here I would be afraid to test her as our home language is not english.

Hi, I just posted a thread on re-testing. We "had" to test my oldest dd at 4-10 for school application processes. She only got English from the environment, preschool, etc. We KNEW going in that her verbal scores would be an underestimate. It was just hard to tell by how much.

In a couple of months, we'll go the same route with my younger one. She's had more hours of preschool...

I guess, your DD will have to be at a "reasonable" level in English for you to get a decent guess. My DD6's leap verbally was pretty significant (jumped from 92% to 99.8th percentile).

I have heard that kids need to have at least 2-3 years of regular, full day school to catch up. We tested my DD, for the second time, after 1 year of K and 3 days of 1st grade; so this second time around is probably still, technically, an underestimate (although in practical matters it doesn't really matter).

Then, there there are better tests for less verbal kids (and bilingual kids in general would probably count as that), so the SB5 is a better choice than the Weschler.

DD is only 27mo and as I work full time has been in english daycare environment for 2 years now. She speaks both languages quite well for her age although in our home language she can express her toughs more "sophisticated". She learns our language from adults and english from toddlers. She obviously can not learn to speak any better english than her peers. In her english I hear her using identical sentences with her friends. We do read in both languages but whenever there is something in a book she wants me to explain I tend to change to our own language. I really don't see her being able to show her full potential in english at 3 (after 3 years fullday english daycare), she could just show the potential of her friends whom she learned to speak from.

DD is only 27mo and as I work full time has been in english daycare environment for 2 years now. She speaks both languages quite well for her age although in our home language she can express her toughs more "sophisticated". She learns our language from adults and english from toddlers. She obviously can not learn to speak any better english than her peers. In her english I hear her using identical sentences with her friends. We do read in both languages but whenever there is something in a book she wants me to explain I tend to change to our own language. I really don't see her being able to show her full potential in english at 3 (after 3 years fullday english daycare), she could just show the potential of her friends whom she learned to speak from. [/quote]

That sounds like my dds, although they had more limited English exposure. It was weird to me when the teachers commented on their language skills, as to me, their English was SO below their other language.

However, that year of Pre-K was really significant. I was reading long chapter books to my dd by then, so even when in school she heard simplified language, at home, we'd read Little House books (for example, and a bad one since we only read 2 of those). I also saw a big leap in that year of Pre-K, because she was in a another preschool by then, and at that school teachers did not dumb down their language.

I have friends whose dd tested very high in verbal skills, in a similar situation to yours (full time day care). Especially as they get into 3 and 4, she will start getting more adult language in her....

In any case, I don't think testing too young can yield a reasonable number; in bilingual kids, even less so.

The Naglieri Non-Verbal assessment is supposed to be a good one to use for non-native English speakers.