As more and more children enter early childhood education programs with limited proficiency in English, it becomes important for caregivers to know how to assess children's language development. This is no easy matter because children learning English as a second language come from many different circumstances and their development follows a number of different paths. Assessing the child's language development is a very important task for practitioners, especially when we think of assessment as a continual process that goes hand-in-hand with instruction.

Because it is important to consider the various forms that second-language learning can take, this paper begins with a discussion of the child's language background. We then discuss some issues in the language development of bilingual children. After that we turn to issues in the language assessment and propose a procedure for assessing language development in bilingual preschool children. This procedure was developed for the State of California to assess first and second language development.

The Child's Language Background

There are many different ways in which children can be exposed to a second language. For some children, two languages are present in the home from birth. For other children, exposure to a second language begins once they enter early childhood education programs. It is customary in the literature to distinguish between children who learn two languages simultaneously and children who learn one language after their first language is established. Because so much of language development occurs before the age of three, the usual convention is to divide children at that point. If the second language is introduced before age three, children are thought to be learning the two languages simultaneously; after the age of three, they are engaged in sequential bilingualism (McLaughlin, 1984).

Furthermore, children differ in their exposure to their languages. Some children receive a great deal of exposure to two languages, whereas for other children one language predominates. In addition, children may be in an environment where the two languages are intermixed in normal adult speech. This practice of "code-switching" is prevalent in many Spanish-speaking communities in California and Texas. Moreover, in migrant Latino families, children may move from one country to another, so that there is a great deal of exposure to English as a second language at some periods, and no exposure at other times.

At the risk of simplifying these complexities we offer in Table 1 a typology of conditions of language exposure and use by bilingual children. In this table, Type 1 bilingualism represents the case of children who are simultaneously bilingual in the sense that both languages develop equally or nearly equally as they are exposed to both and have good opportunities to use both. Although perfectly balanced bilinguals are rare, many children in early childhood education programs have been exposed to two languages and use both. For example, many children speak Spanish with their parents and older relatives, but English with their siblings and other children.

Type 2 represents children who have had high exposure to a second language throughout their lives, but have had little opportunity to use the language. For example, many migrant children from Mexico hear English on television, in stores and so on, but use Spanish in everyday communication. When they enter early childhood education programs, these children are likely to make rapid progress in English because their comprehension skills have been developed.

TABLE 1
A Typology of Bilingual Development Based on Conditions of Exposure and Use
Subsequent Experience
High Opportunity/ motivation for use of both languages: Low opportunity/ motivation for use of both languages:
Prior Experience
High exposure to both languages: Simultaneous Bilingualism
(Type 1)
Receptive Bilingualism
(Type 2)
Low exposure to one language: Rapid Sequential Bilingualism
(Type 3)
Slow Sequential Bilingualism
(Type 4)

Types 3 and 4 represent children who are learning a second language sequentially, that is, after the first language is established. Type 3 children have also had little exposure to English before entering early childhood education programs, but they use English as much as they can and so are likely to be more rapid learners than are Type 4 children. In the case of Type 4 children, there has been little prior exposure to English and they have few opportunities-or avail themselves of few opportunities-to use English.

Individual differences in the use children make of the opportunities to use a second language have been noted by many observers. Some children not only use the language as much as possible, but they are "high input generators" in the sense that they get people around them to use English in ways that are most helpful to their learning. Other children tend not to use the language very much and as a result do not get as much help as they could. We will return to the issue of individual differences in the next section.