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Bilingualism/Second-Language Researchand the Assessment of Oral Proficiency

in Minority Bilingual Children

Liliana SnchezRutgers University

This article discusses some of the challenges that researchers working in the fields ofbilingualism and second-language acquisition (SLA) and in the field of languagetesting face in developing comparable andculturally andcognitivelyappropriate datacollection and language assessment tools for bilingual children from rural minor-ity-language communities with low levels of literacy. These challenges include de-

fining language proficiency in a bilingual continuum, avoiding cultural biases, andattaining cross-linguistic validity. Using evidence from oral proficiency and auralcomprehension tasks developed for bilingualism and SLA research and for the as-sessment of language proficiency in QuechuaSpanish and AymaraSpanish bilin-gual students in the public schools of Peru, I illustrate recent attempts to develop ap-propriate tests to probe into bilingual students linguistic competence.

One of the major challenges that researchers in the field of bilingual and sec-ond-language acquisition (SLA) face is the development of data collection toolsthat are appropriate to assess linguistic knowledge in bilingual children from ruralminority-language communities who have low levels of literacy. The different lev-els of language proficiency among bilingual minority children, the predominanceof oral traditions over the written text in many of these communities, and differ-ences in oral text structures that challenge cross-linguistic validity are some of thedifficulties that researchers face. Developing data collection tools appropriate tomeasure the childrens level of proficiency that, at the same time, allow for com-parisons with results from bilingual and monolingual children living in other con-

LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT QUARTERLY,3(2), 117149Copyright 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Correspondence should be addressed to Liliana Snchez, Department of Spanish and Portugese,

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texts constitutes a major challenge. Educators and linguists in charge of develop-ing language assessment instruments for bilingual minority children in rural multi-

lingual contexts also face these difficulties.In this article, I attempt to illustrate how some of the approaches to oral data col-

lection developed in the fields of bilingualism and SLA research and to oral profi-ciency assessment in the field of language testing can converge and be beneficial toacademic communities preoccupied with language assessment among bilingualminority groups. I focus on what I consider three of the major challenges to the de-velopment of data collection tools and language assessment instruments for indig-enous QuechuaSpanish and AymaraSpanish bilingual children in Peru. Theseare (a) the definition of proficiency in a bilingual continuum, (b) the risk of not at-

taining cultural appropriateness in the design of language assessment tasks, and (c)the construction of cross-linguistic valid assessment tools in a multilingual con-text. I present examples from data collection tools developed for two bilingual ac-quisition research projects that I conducted among QuechuaSpanish communi-ties and examples of oral proficiency assessment tools designed for acommunicative-oriented pilot test project among QuechuaSpanish andAymaraSpanish bilingual children. The latter was conducted in 1999 by theUnidad de Medicin de Calidad (Quality Measurement Unit) at Perus Ministry ofEducation and Grupo de Anlisis delDesarrollo (GRADE), a nongovernmental re-

search organization in Peru dedicated to general issues of societal development, in-cluding education. I participated as a consultant for GRADE. The examples pre-sented in this article come mostly from oral production and comprehension tasks,because these were introduced for the first time as language assessment tools forindigenous communities at the national level in 1999, although the pilot test alsoincluded reading and writing tasks.

Before I proceed to present how these examples illustrate possible solutions tothe aforementioned challenges, I provide a brief grammatical description of thethree languages involved. Spanish is an Indo-European language with rich verbal

flexive morphology. It does not make overt case distinctions in relation to fullnouns, although it does do so in relation to some pronouns in certain structural con-texts. Quechua and Aymara are two Amerindian languages from the QuechuaArufamily. Both languages have very rich verbal flexive morphology and overt casemarking of full nouns. The canonical word order in Quechua and Aymara is sub-jectobjectverb (Cerrn-Palomino, 1989) and subjectverbobject in Spanish(Contreras, 1976). The three languages rely on word order alterations to conveydifferences in the informational structure of a sentence. Spanish intonational pat-terns vary along with informational structure (Zubizarreta, 1998), whereas Quech-

ua and Aymara use suffixes to mark new andold information. Additionally, the twolanguages have a rich morphological paradigm of evidential markers and affixes

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Aymara and some varieties of Quechua differ from Spanish in that they have aspi-rated and glottal stops (ejectives) and have a three-vowel system (Cerrn-

Palomino, 1989). Spanish lacks phonological differences based on aspiration andglotalization and has a five-vowel underlying system. Despite these differences,the three languages coincide in that they are prodrop languages with a rich para-digm of subject agreement morphology.

This article is organized as follows. In the first and second sections, I presentsome background on the approaches to data collection methods used in bilingual-ism and SLA research and in the field of language testing among minority commu-nities. Furthermore, I examine language testing practices traditionally used in Peruto assess the language abilities among Quechua and Aymara indigenous communi-

ties. In the third section, I present some ideas on how to use general sociolinguisticquestionnaires to collect data that are helpful in identifying levels of language ex-posure and frequency and preference of use as complementary measures of profi-ciency in communities characterized by differences across individuals in the levelsof proficiency in each language. In the fourth section, I present three examples oforal data collection and oral proficiency assessment tools that incorporate the oraltradition of the indigenous populations and elements of the childrens environmentand therefore are culturally appropriate. The first one is a classroom-based ques-tionnaire that allows teachers to assess the language proficiency of students in their

classroom. The second example is a picture-based storytelling task that makes useof appropriate cultural references in the childrens environment, and the third is apicture-based description task used in a pilot test developed for national testing inPeru. Finally in the fifth section, I illustrate the issue of cross-linguistic validity inthe construction of aural comprehension tasks in Quechua, Aymara, andSpanish.

ISSUES IN BILINGUAL ASSESSMENT AND

BILINGUALISM AND SLA RESEARCH

In this section, I review some of the most salient views on data collection in thefields of bilingual and SLA as well as some of the views on language assessmentthat are prevalent in the field of bilingual education for minorities. I relate theseperspectives to the views that have characterized the assessment of QuechuaSpanish and AymaraSpanish bilingualism in the rural indigenous communities inPeru.

In research on early and simultaneous bilingualism, data collection tech-niques used to measure linguistic knowledge in bilingual children have primarily

focused on obtaining oral production data in both languages (Deuchar & Quay,2000; Genesee, 1989; Meisel, 1986; J. Paradis & Genesee,1997) and on

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Experimental techniques have not been absent from research on early bilingualacquisition, but they have been mostly oriented toward eliciting either oral pro-

duction in specific areas of linguistic knowledge such as word recognition(Grosjean, 1998) or processing strategies in bilinguals with and without lan-guage impairments (M. Paradis, 1993). Thus, the assessment of linguisticknowledge in bilingual children has been mostly based on oral production andcomprehension data. The prevalence of aural/oral data collection techniquesover written ones is understandable because at the early stages of acquisition, lit-eracy is not yet completely developed. This view is not unlike that of researchersstudying linguistic knowledge among communities with low levels of literacy.Indeed, indigenous communities such as the Quechua- and Aymara-speaking

communities have strong oral traditions and have been, up until the present,characterized by low levels of literacy (Zavala, 2002). This characteristic favorsassessment techniques that focus on oral production and comprehension ratherthan on writing and reading skills, as these are more appropriate given the lowerlevels of literacy that characterize some of these indigenous communities.

A different situation has characterized data collection in SLA research. In thisfieldtwoapproachestodatacollectioncoexist.Oneisanapproachthatfavorsexper-imental data collection methods and techniques (Duffield & White, 1999; Epstein,Flynn,&Martohardjono,1996;White,2003;White&Genesee,1996)andrelieson

acceptability judgments,elicited imitation tasks,andtruth-valuejudgments,amongothers (Mackey & Gass, 2005). A different tradition focuses on naturalistic data(Mackey&Gass,2005)andtechniquesthatelicitoralproductionsuchasspontane-ous narrations, picture-based descriptions, and interaction tasks. These data collec-tiontechniquestendtoincorporate,inadditiontolinguisticcompetence,communi-cativeandpragmaticcompetence(Bachman,1990,2000).Thetwoperspectivesarerootedindifferentviewsofwhatisbeingmeasured.Theperceptionthatoralproduc-tion might reflect knowledge of language use but not necessarily linguistic compe-tence hasguardedsome researchers in the first tradition against an extremereliance

on spontaneous oral production data andhasdriven theneed for the development ofexperimental techniques that exertmaximumcontrol on the conditions for oral pro-duction (Munich, Flynn, & Martohardjiono, 1994). Nevertheless, spontaneous andguidedoralproductiondatahaveproventobevaluableinanalyzingdifferentaspectsofSLAsuchasultimateattainmentandfirst-languageloss.Recentproposalsonulti-mate attainment and first-language loss in SLA have benefited from the study ofguidednarrationsaswellasfromdataobtainedthroughmorecontrolledexperimen -tal data (Montrul, 2002; Sorace, 2000) and must not be excluded from research onlinguistic knowledge in bilinguals. Furthermore, the establishment of oral profi-

ciencyassessmenttoolsforsecondorforeignlanguagessuchastheOralProficiencyInterview(Alonso,1997)hasalsohadastrongimpactoncurrentviewsofwhatlan-

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In the case of SLA research among Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communi-ties, experimental research techniques can be used to study the acquisition of

Spanish as a second language, and in fact they have been used for comprehension(Kalt, 2000), but their use has been constrained by the development of literacy andacademic use of language in the communities studied. As in other traditional com-munities such as the Maori community (Marshall & Peters, 1989), oral productiondata collection techniques that incorporate narrations or guided conversations haveproven more effective (Escobar, 1990; Snchez, 2003, 2004). This type of assess-ment tools has the advantage of making use of the communities practices and tra-ditions.

Even in nontraditional communities, oral proficiency measures are considered

desirable measures of bilingual assessment. Shohamy (2000) reviewed the relationbetween SLA research and language testing. After surveying the literature on SLAand language testing available at the time, Shohamy concluded that the field of lan-guage testing would benefit from, among other approaches, expanding the contextof testing beyond psychometrics and addressing educational issues.

From this brief overview, it becomes apparent that data collection and languageassessment among bilinguals have benefited from methods and techniques that donot rely exclusively on reading and writing tasks and that incorporate, in additionto linguistic competence, oral production in broader communicative contexts as a

measure of bilingual knowledge.Further confirmation comes from the field of bilingual education for minority

populations in the United States. Researchers such as Valds and Figueroa (1994)have strongly recommended moving away from standardized written tests and in-stead emphasizing the assessment of oral skills in minority students. In their com-prehensive proposal for language assessment of bilingual minority children,Valds and Figueroa identified three dominant perspectives in the assessment ofbilingual children in the United States. The first is viewing the bilingual as a nativespeaker of two languages. The second involves viewing the bilingual as a native

speaker of one of the languages and a learner of the other. The third position isviewing the bilingual as a native speaker of neither of the two languages. Neitherthe first nor the third perspectives have characterized language assessment of in-digenous Quechua- and Aymara-speaking children living in rural communities inPeru. These communities were mostly monolingual until the second half of thenineteenth century. It was only after major agrarian and educational reforms radi-cally changed the social conditions of indigenous communities in the rural areas ofthe country that bilingualism in indigenous languages and Spanish, the dominantlanguage in the country, emerged in rural areas (Steckbauer, 2000). This is evi-

denced in the discussions on education and monolingualism in Quechua andAymara that preoccupied academics in the fields of education, linguistics, and an-


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bilingualism has not been a characteristic associated with rural indigenous com-munities. Paradoxically, the expansion of the educational system to all rural areas

of the country in the second half of the twentieth century was based on Span-ish-only educational policies for all indigenous communities (Pozzi-Escot, 1972),with the exception of some experimental bilingual education programs (Davis,1997; Hornberger, 1987; Steckbauer, 2000; Ziga & Lozada, 1985). Early studieson the contact varieties of Spanish spoken in rural areas inaugurated the view thatthe Spanish spoken by rural indigenous populations was not an incorrect versionof Spanish or a creolized variety of Spanish (Cerrn-Palomino, 1972) but aninterlecto(interlect,), a term introduced by Escobar (1978) that reflects the de-velopments in the field of applied linguistics at the time (cf. Selinker, 1972). Al-

though the view that indigenous bilingual communities acquire Spanish as a sec-ond language still holds for most of the rural areas of the Southern Andes of Peru,there are other areas in which second-generations of bilinguals are emerging(Snchez, 2003) and rapid language shifts from Quechua or Aymara into Spanishresults in monolingualism in Spanish (Cerrn-Palomino, 1989). This reality fur-ther presses researchers and testers to use assessment tools that are capable of deal-ing with the complexity of the sociolinguistic composition of the indigenous popu-lations without oversimplifying the language contact context.

In this type of language contact situations, one of the risks that bilingual assess-

ment faces is assuming a standard of indistinguishability from monolinguals to as-sess bilinguals (Valds & Figueroa, 1994). This trend has been evidenced in theUnited States by the application of traditional analytical discrete-point standard-ized tests that are based on the notion that language is learned by successive pro-gression through skills and broken down into linguistic components (Valds &Figueroa, 1994, p. 44). These tests focus on reading and writing skills, and the re-sults obtained by bilingual children in them are frequently compared to the resultsobtained by monolingual children. Until recently, the application of a similar lan-guage assessment policy in Peru had devastating effects in the evaluation of the ac-

ademic progress of indigenous populations. Bilingual children had dismally lowerscores on standardized language arts tests than children from Spanish monolingualcommunities as attested by the differential results in academic achievement be-tween rural and urban populations (Instituto Nacional de Estadstica [INEI],2005).1

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1The last complete census data available from Pers INEI is from 1993. Data available for 2000does not include information on school delay or dropout rates according to the variable mother tongue.

The closest indicator for academic success among indigenous populations for recent years is the ur-banrural distinction. In 2000, the number of speakers (> 5 years) in rural areas for each language was3,342,932 for Spanish; 1,782,551 for Quechua; 269,614 for Aymara; 113,078 for other native lan-

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Valds and Figueroa (1994) strongly recommended that standardized tests con-structed for monolingual populations not be used to assess bilingual populations

for any aspect of decision-making processes. They strongly opposed the psycho-metric tradition of measuring discrete aspects of language knowledge and pro-posed to focus on the already existing oral skills of children who are circumstantialbilinguals.

In addition to moving toward proficiency-based tests, Valds and Figueroa(1994) suggested that a cautious approach be used in bilingual assessments for thepractice of the self-rating of language abilities in the two languages by bilinguals.Given the limited exposure that bilinguals have to different registers in the minor-ity language, Valds and Figueroa considered sociolinguistic questionnaires infor-

mative tools only when combined with other measures. They provided baselineinformation about the role and function that two languages have played and play ina bilinguals life (p. 53). In the next section, I present a sociolinguistic question-naire used in a research project among Quechua-speaking communities in Peruthat constituted an attempt to obtain data on the patterns of language use and lan-guage preference among bilingual indigenous communities.

THE ASSESSMENT OF INDIGENOUS BILINGUAL

CHILDREN IN PERU

Until the year 2000, nation- or regionwide tests in Peru were written tests con-structed and administered in Spanish to all children, including those for whomSpanish was a second language. As mentioned earlier, this practice has had disas-trous consequences for bilingual children from indigenous communities becauseof the way in which tests results have been interpreted. Although the INEI (2005)in Peru identified a wide range of socioeconomic factors as responsible for the lowlevels of achievement among children from indigenous communities when com-

pared to the rest of the country (such as the childrens participation in farming ac-tivities and the fact that most of them live in rural areas), INEI also found a higherpercentage in school delay among children who were speakers of an indigenouslanguage when compared to Spanish-speaking children (see Table 1). This is notsurprising if tests written in Spanish and originally formulated for speakers of thatlanguage are the tools used to assess their progress.

In the past few decades, two factors contributed to the continuation of Span-ish-only testing practices among bilingual children: first, the traditional approachto language assessment that focused on obtaining nationwide scores on language

abilities based on formal knowledge of grammatical concepts rather than on the as-sessment of acquired competencies and, second, the perception that bilingual pro-


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tually be mainstreamed into Spanish-only secondary education programs (Ziga,Snchez, & Zacharas, 2000).2

It has only recently been the case that institutions in charge of evaluating com-municative abilities in children throughout the nation, such as the Unidad deMedicin de Calidad Educativa (Educational Quality Measurement Unit) at PerusMinistry of Education with the support of GRADE, an educational consultingagency, have begun to develop tests to assess the oral proficiency of bilingual chil-dren from minority communities. The initiative to assess language proficiency

among indigenous bilingual children was put forth by the Unidad de Medicin deCalidad and GRADE as part of the Crecer con Calidad y Equidad en elRendimiento (CRECER) 2000 (Unidad de Medicin de Calidad Educativa 2000)project.3 This change was brought about by a new approach to the teaching of oraland written communicative skills in elementary schools in Latin America(Condemarn & Molina, 1999; Jolibert, 1999) and in particular to the teaching ofsecond languages at the elementary-school level (Davis, 1997; Lpez & Jung,1988; Ministerio de Educacin, Cultura y Deportes, 1997). This new approachsupports the view that children acquire communicative competencies gradually

and that language assessment should measure acquisition of such competenciesrather than metalinguistic knowledge. At the same time, the support for bilingualintercultural programs in the late 1990s experienced some resurgence (Uccelli,1998), and the need to evaluate linguistic development in native indigenous lan-guages (such as Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish, the dominant language amongstudents participating in bilingual programs) was recognized by some sectors of

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TABLE 1

Percentage of School Delay Among Spanish-, Quechua-,

and Aymara-Speaking Children

Ages 614

Native Language Delay % Drop-Out %

Spanish 34.8 9.4Aymara 47.2 8.0Quechua 62.8 10.1Other native languages 62.4 12.4

Note. From INEI (2005). Based on the 1993 National Census (Ziga et al. 2000).

2These nationwide testingpractices persisted despite the fact that the first national public document

on language policy was published in 1972 and that bilingual education programs for indigenous popu-lationshave been in place intermittently in different regions since the 1980s (see Hornberger [1989]andZiga & Lozada [1985] for evaluations of two of those programs)

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the educational authorities. One major factor, however, constrains the possibilityof implementing oral bilingual assessment on a nationwide basis: the scarcity of

resources in the educational sector. As we see in the next sections of this article,this constraint is at the basis of some of the choices that must be made in assessingthe communicative skills of indigenous bilingual children.

DEFINING PROFICIENCY IN A BILINGUAL CONTINUUM

In the case of bilingual and SLA research in communities characterized by societal

bilingualism, the issue of the degree of bilingualism and the frequency of exposureto each of the languages spoken by the child is very important because it raisesquestions such as the comparability of the data and the variability in the linguisticbackground of the participants in a study. Such problems are also present in the as-sessment of language proficiency in students who live in indigenous bilingualcommunities characterized by a continuum of individuals with different degreesand types of bilingualism and different patterns of language use (Marshall & Pe-ters, 1989).

As recommended by Valds and Figueroa (1994), one of the most valuable

tools for a first approach to communities characterized by such levels of variationis the use of initial sociolinguistic questionnaires that gather data on the linguisticbackground of the participants. Their results provide us with a sense of languagepreference and frequency of exposure to each of the languages in the bilingualcommunities. In bilingual research they allow us to establish patterns of languageuse for the child at home and in the classroom setting that allow us, along withother tools, to measure the availability of input in each of the languages to the bilin-gual child. A basic sample sociolinguistic questionnaire (see the questionnairefrom Ziga et al., 2000, in the appendix) must inquire for data about the chil -

drens early exposure to the two languages spoken in his or her environment (Items611, 20) and patterns of language use and networks of speakers at home (Items1215, 24), in school (Items 2539), and in other social contexts (Items 4045).The questionnaire in the appendix was used to interview children (ages 914) andcontains items that require some evaluation of the usefulness of the languages indifferent contexts (Items 46 and 47); however, this basic questionnaire can be mod-ified to include fewer or more items depending on the age of the children inter-viewed. Information about language preference for leisure and enjoyable activities(Items 16 and 19) is also very valuable in determining the childs affective connec-

tion to each of the language communities. The original questionnaires used in thestudy reported in Ziga et al. were administered orally in Spanish, Quechua, or


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Figures 1 and 2 are elaborated with data from a research project on Quech-uaSpanish bilingualism in two communities characterized by language shift

(Snchez, 2003). The figures illustrate how sociolinguistic questionnaires canshed light on the linguistic background and the perceptions about the type of bilin-gualism experienced by a student population.

Figure 1 shows the childrens responses to the question about their first lan-guage in a simplified version of the sample sociolinguistic questionnaire. The itemwas answered by a sample of 58 QuechuaSpanish bilingual students in fourth tosixth grade in the Central Andes of Peru and in the department of San Martin. Inthese two regions, language shift is taking place at a faster pace now than in priordecades (Snchez, 2003).4 The answers to this question divide the community of

students into three groups with clearly distinct self-perceptions of their mothertongue(s). In both regions, the largest group considered Spanish to be their firstlanguage, a smaller second group of children considered Quechua to be their firstlanguage, and an even smaller group of children identified themselves as simulta-neous bilinguals. I take this to indicate that the childrens perceptions of theirmother tongue are reflective of a language shift situation in which a majority of thechildren begin to think of themselves either as bilingual from birth or as nativespeakers of the socially dominant language.

Figure 2 shows the results of the same item applied to a sample of 347 stu-

dents in Grades 5 and 6 in the Southern Andes of Peru, an area in which lan-guage shift from Quechua into Spanish is also taking place but at a slower pace(Ziga et al., 2000; see footnote 3). In this region, the largest group considersthe native language to be their mother tongue. A comparatively much smallergroup of children consider Spanish to be their first language, and a very smallgroup of children consider themselves simultaneous bilinguals. In this case theresponses to the same item show that the childrens perceptions of their mothertongue reflect a situation in which bilingualism is not perceived by the childrento be an extended phenomenon.

These samples show that indigenous communities are undergoing processes oflanguage shift that are affecting the childrens perceptions about their first lan-guage in significantly different ways. A majority of children perceived the nativelanguage to be their mother tongue in the Southern Andes, but this was not the casefor the Central Andes and San Martin. These perceptions must be taken into ac-count when designing language assessment tools for bilinguals. Establishing thedegrees of bilingualism that characterize different indigenous populations ofschool age in a country such as Peru has become a very difficult task in a situation

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4These sample data come from two districts experiencing language shift from Quechua into Span-ish For the district of Ulc ma o (Central Andes) the 1993 cens s reported a total of 2 347 speakers of

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in which language shift affects the linguistic composition of rural areas. Responsesto sociolinguistic questionnaires, although not proof in itself of the actual exposure

that the children have to the two languages, are revealing of the perceptions thatchildren have about their own bilingualism, and these perceptions may have someimpact on how they perform in each of the languages in tasks aimed at collectingdata for research or for educational assessment purposes.

Although the number of students interviewed for a research project can be man-ageable, the administration of such questionnaires as a previous step for the elabo-ration of regionwide language proficiency pilot tests could be very expensive. Thisis particularly true if the questionnaires are administered by agents external to theschools. In the case of some rural areas of Peru, access to the schools involves a

journey of up to 2 days by foot. For that reason, to explore the sociolinguistic com-position of the children in particular schools, a more realistic practice is to developquestionnaires that can be distributed to the teachers for data collection. A simpli-fied version of the questionnaire in the appendix with questions on the childs pat-terns of language use in different environments (at home, in school, in the fields, intown, in church, or at the temple) can allow teachers and researchers to better un-derstand the types of register that the child is exposed to in each of the languagesspoken in his or her community. Assessment of the childs oral proficiency in bothlanguages has better chances of being fair and adequate if it is based or supported

by information on his or her language preferences and practices according to dif-ferent contexts and interlocutors.

THE ASSESSMENT OF ORAL SKILLS:

THE ISSUE OF COMPARABILITY

AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATENESS

Classroom Assessment

In addition to sociolinguistic questionnaires, oral proficiency assessment tools arenecessary to determine the level of language proficiency of the children in theclassrooms. In a guide for teachers working in rural bilingual areas of Peru(Snchez, 2001), I suggested some guidelines for classroom testing that wouldserve as an initial evaluation of the children at the beginning of the academic year.This is particularly necessary in rural areas where elementary schools tend to betaught by one teacher and classrooms consist of students of different ages, grades,and levels of language proficiency. A sample oral proficiency exploratory test inSpanish is shown in the following. It can be used for testing at the novice and inter-mediate levels of proficiency in Spanish as a second language:5

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Basic Level: Comprehension

1. The teacher begins a warm-up exploration with the child:A. Hola _____, buenos das/tardes. Cmo ests?

Hello ______, good morning/afternoon. How are you?

B. Cmo te llamas?What is your name?

C. Cuntos aos tienes?How old are you?

D. Cmo se llama tu pap?What is your dads name?

E. Cmo se llama tu mam?What is your moms name?

Basic Level: Production

2. The teacher continues only if the child was able to engage in the first ex-change.

The teacher points at several items in the classroom such as pencils, erasers, note-books, pencil sharpener and asks the child:

A. Aqu tenemos varios tiles escolares. Podras decirme cmo sellaman?Here we have several school supplies. Could you please tell me what

are they called?

Then the teacher shows the child pictures with animals and asks:B. Qu animalitos tienes en casa/en la chacra?

What animals do you have at home/in the farm?

Intermediate Level: Comprehension

3. The teacher shows the child a picture of a house and a school and asks:

A. Ahora presta mucha atencin, aqu ves el dibujo de una casa y un

colegio.Now, pay attention, here you can see a drawing of a house and a


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Next I will tell you the name of some things and you will tell me wherethey are used.

Example: Q: La tiza, Se usa en casa o en el colegio?Chalk. Is it used at home or in school?A: La tiza se usa en el colegio.Chalk is used in school.

B. Muy bien. De esta manera vamos a continuar. Ahora te dir las demspalabras.Very good. Let us continue with the other words.

Borrador, pizarra, olla, etc.Eraser, board, pot, etc.

Intermediate Level: Production

4. The teacher says:

A. Describe uno de tus animalitos, o describe tu chacra.Describe oneof your pets/farm animals or describe your fields/farm.

5. Then he or she asks:

A. Qu haces en tu casa?What do you do at home?

B. Qu haces en tu chacra?What do you do in the fields?

C. Qu hace tu pap en la chacra?What does your dad do in the fields?

D. Qu hace tu mam en la chacra?What does your mom do in the fields?

This kind of exploratory assessment of the childrens communicative skills wouldhelp the teacher locate the child in one of several proficiency groups for oral com-munication activities (Vsquez, Snchez, Lucero, Snchez, & Carvajal, 1999).Notice, however, that classroom testing cannot be used for general assessment be-cause it would be very difficult to draw general comparisons from the data ob-

tained. In the next section, I discuss some of the proposals made for oral profi-ciency assessment among indigenous communities in a regional pilot test

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Regional Oral Proficiency Assessment

In deciding how to develop regional tests that make use of communicatively ori-ented assessment methodologies in rural areas, one of the most important factorsthat must be taken into account is the overwhelming predominance of a strong oraltradition over literacy among indigenous communities. As in the case of bilingual-ism and SLA research, obtaining data from bilingual children in two languages is aprocess that is greatly facilitated when using oral proficiency tasks rather thantasks that require higher degrees of literacy than those currently found in the ruralareas of Peru (such as tasks that require high levels of metalinguistic awareness6).Tasks that work in such environments are those that focus on the oral skills such asthe ability to describe characters and narrate stories.

Deciding which tasks are more appropriate to collect oral proficiency data andto assess oral proficiency is a particularly difficult challenge in view of the wideranging variety of data collection techniques that have been developed by re-searchers to elicit oral production among communities with high levels of literacyand who live in urban settings (Gass & Selinker, 1996; McDaniel, Mc Kee, &Smith Cairns, 1996).

In bilingualism and SLA research, we look for language use that is representa-tive, to the extent that it is possible, of the language abilities and linguistic knowl-edge of the child; and we examine language use that is comparable to other sets ofdata, as well as reliable and accurate. In language assessment, particular emphasisis put on the issue of reliability and accuracy of test results. In both cases, data col-lection tools must not be culturally biased in such a way that they make it impossi-ble for the child to demonstrate to the best of his or her abilities in the level of profi-ciency attained in a particular language. At the same time, they must provideinformation comparable to data sets from other children. We also look in bothfields to reduce variation in the testing conditions.

In testing oral proficiency, picture-based tasks are particularly helpful becausethey allow us to have some control over the item that the child will describe or thestory that he or she will narrate. This type of control is more difficult to obtain withopen-ended questionnaires or even with guided conversations. The use of the samepicture or series of pictures also allows for a comparison of descriptions and narra-tions across children. The pictures, however, must be reflective of the childs visualenvironment. In developing pictures that couldserve as thebasis for descriptions ornarrativesbychildrenwithlowlevelsofliteracy,itisbettertousepicturesthatfocuson a central character and to select characters that are present in the childrens envi-ronmentsuchasdomesticanimalsandpets.Petsinparticularhaveanimportantrole


6Examples of this kind of task are elicited imitation tasks and picture-based grammaticality judg-

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in the lives of children living in rural environments because in certain rural areas ofPeru, children participate in farming and animal-rearing activities. Figure 3 illus-

trates one of the pictures used in a picture-based story telling task in one of the re-search projects conducted in the Central Andes and in the area of San Martin(Snchez,2003).7 Thistaskhadasitsmaingoaltoobtainnarrativescontainingtran-sitiveverbsandpronominalformsinQuechuaandinSpanish.Thesedatawereana-lyzed as part of a study on bilingual syntactic representation in the two languages,andtheresultsshowedevidenceofconvergenceincertainaspectsofthemorphologyand the syntax of the two languages (Snchez, 2003). The decision to choose thistypeoftaskwasmadetakingintoaccountthat,amongcommunitieswithlowlevelsof literacy, oral production tasks such as picture-based story telling tasks, which

were originally developed for children living in urban environments, need to beadaptedtotherealitiesofindigenouscommunitiesinruralareas(seeSnchez,2003,forissuesrelatedtothedifficultiesintheapplicationofsuchtechniques).Itissome-timesverydifficultfortheresearcherworkinginruralcommunitiestoobtaindataus-ing tests based on images that were originally developed for urban children sur-rounded by a literate culture. In my own experience, in some very isolated ruralareas, even older children (914) from communities with very low levels of literacytend to identify the image of a child dressed in the same unfamiliar clothing in a se-quenceofpicturesasadifferentchildineachpicture.Thatis,theconventionthatthe

character is the same throughout a series of picture that works in a literate environ-ment is not universally shared. For that reason, in most cases, the researcher mustfindacompromisebetweenthegoalofobtainingdatathatcanbecross-linguisticallycomparable and the realities of the cultural environment of the participants in thestudies.InthecaseoftheresearchprojectintheCentralAndesandSanMartin,therewas an additional complication: The two groups of children participating in thestudy lived in rural areas but in different geographical locations. The children in theCentralAndes lived in a cold mountainous environment whereas the children in theSan Martin area lived in a tropical Amazonian environment. To use the Mayer and

Mayers (1975) frog story pictures, some changes in them were needed. The centralcharacter of the story is a boy. He had his clothes changed and his shoes removed inthe pictures used in the study to match the types of clothing with which childrenwould be familiar. One of the animals, the dog, also had to be redrawn to look morefamiliartothechildren.Thesechangescanbeseeninthecontrastbetweenthemodi-fied picture (Figure 3) and the original picture (Figure 4):

Additionally, other changes were made to match the childrens environment.For example, in Figure 3, high mountains replaced the trees to resemble the Cen-tral Andes environment. However, some were painted in green to suggest the

greener hills that surround the Amazonian area of San Martin.

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FIGURE 3 Picture-based story-telling task.

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The choices made for data collection tools in bilingualism and SLA researchare not fundamentally different from the choices that educators must make to as-

sess the communicative and linguistic proficiency of bilinguals. Nevertheless, lan-guage evaluators in charge of developing nationwide language assessment tools inPeru face an additional burden. Unlike researchers, who set their own researchquestions and make decisions on appropriate data collection tools based on thosequestions, educators in charge of assessment for educational purposes must selectthe abilities to be tested from a set of official guidelines preestablished by educa-tional authorities.

I now illustrate the kind of choices made by evaluators in the field of languageassessment in Peru. In 2000 the Unidad de Medicin de Calidad at the Ministry of

Education in collaboration with the nongovernmental organization GRADE devel-oped a pilot test to assess the aural/oral proficiency of Quechua- and Aymara-speaking children as part of a larger language arts assessment project (CRECER,2000). One of the major concerns in elaborating this pilot test was to assess thechilds ability to describe in each of the languages present in his or her environ-ment (Snchez & Prez, 2000) and to do so following the guidelines in the officialcurricular document of the country (Ministerio de Educacin, 1999).8 Table 2presents three abilities listed in the official curriculum for communicative skillsand illustrates two abilities selected and one not selected for testing along with the

justification provided by the members of the testing team to include or to excludethem.

As Table 2 shows, the oral production ability selected was one for which a pic-ture-based task could be used in a testing situation different from the everydayclassroom routine. This type of task allows evaluators to control for aspects of thechildrens production such as vocabulary items and the approximate length andstructure of responses. The aural ability selected could also be tested in a contextdifferent from the everyday classroom routine using tape recorders, although therewere reservations about their use in rural environments. Testing of this ability also

allows the evaluator to have some control over the vocabulary used by the child andover the length of the responses. The two abilities selected could be tested in condi-tions that would make the results comparable across populations. On the otherhand, the ability not selected for the pilot test was one strongly linked to everydayclassroom routine and, due to budget and time limitations, could not be reproducedin a generalized testing situation outside the classroom.

In the pilot test, the items elaborated to assess the attainment of the abilitiesselected were presented to the child sequentially. First, the child listened to astory in each of the languages and answered three questions related to the text he

or she had just heard (see the next section for a detailed discussion of the con-

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struction of the listening task). Then the child was presented with a picture. Asin the picture-based task used in the research project previously described, it wasnecessary to use images of elements that were familiar to the child and that

could be compared with data from children living in other geographical environ-ments. The team working on the elaboration of items for the pilot test agreedthat pets or farm animals were some of the most familiar elements in the chil-drens environments. Pet animals were particularly good as testing images asthey could also allow comparisons with data from monolingual Spanish-speak-ing children living in other rural and urban environments. Description was elic-ited using a picture-based technique and instructions and questions were elabo-rated in three languages: Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish. Figure 5 illustrates oneof the pictures used in the following item.

Spanish

6. Ahora vamos a hacer otra cosa. Vas a ver unos dibujos. Mralos bien ydespus te voy a hacer unas preguntas.Now, well do something different. You will see some pictures. Take agood look at them and later I will ask you some questions.

Quechua


TABLE 2

Sample of the Abilities Selected and Not Selected for Testing

Abilities Justification

The child describes persons, animals, plants,objects, places, situations and elements fromhis or her natural and cultural environment(real or fictional).

This ability was tested because it could beeasily elicited in a testing situation outsidethe classroom setting.

The child engages in dialogues or small groupconversations to make agreements, develop aworking plan, or organize information.

This ability was not evaluated in a pilot testbecause it refers to processes that take placein the classroom, and, due to budget andtime limitations, it could not be reproducedin the testing environment.

The child listens attentively and understandsdifferent discourse styles (instructions,stories, reports, explanations) about specifictopics.

This ability was tested because it could beeasily elicited in a testing situation outsidethe classroom setting by using atape-recorded story.

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Aymara

8. Jichaxa maya sixsutanaka uxatma. Kunatixa ukatxa maya jisktawinakajistamama.

After the child was given some time to observe the picture, the test administratorasked the following questions:

Spanish

9. Qu ves aqu?What do you see here?

10. Cmo es este animalito?How would you describe this animal?

Quechua

11. Imatataq kaypi rikunki?12. Mayhinam kay allquchaqa?

Aymara

13. Kunsa akana ujtaxa?14. Kunjamasa aka anu qalluxa?

The team proposed to grade this kind of item using a holistic scale based on the de-

gree to which the child showed proficiency with respect to the skill. The scale isshown in the following.

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FIGURE 5 Picture-based oralproficiency testing item.

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B. In the process of acquiring the abilityC. Ability not attainedType 1

D. Ability not attainedType 2

A grade ofAwas assigned to answers that showed a full command of the ability todescribe objects;Bwas assigned to answers that showed some relevant informa-tion but did not show a full command of the ability to describe;Cwas assigned toanswers with wrong or unstructured information. If the child remained silent, shereceived a grade ofD. As a way to illustrate how the criteria were applied, I showthe contents of the rubric for the answer to Question 10.

A: The child has attained this ability if he or she gives an answer in which he orshe mentions three of the following characteristics: size, color, body parts, posses-sion of some object, position of the animal, aesthetic valuation of the animal, or itsappearance. The child uses the verbsto beand to have. Example: The bird hasmany colors, it has a nest, some eggs and it is standing on a branch.

B: The child is in the process of acquiring the ability if he or she mentions lessthan three of the characteristics covered inA. Example: The bird has many colors.Pretty.

C: The child has not acquired the ability if he or she produces an unstructured

discourse. Example: Bird colors.D: The child has not acquired the ability if he or she cannot answer the ques-

tion or says he or she cannot answer.

To obtain basic levels of intergrader reliability, graders participated in a one-dayworkshop in which they compared, analyzed, and justified their grading. No sam-ples of the language data obtained can be presented in this article because these aretreated as confidential material by the Ministry of Education. Despite the fact that Iam not at liberty to discuss the results of the pilot study, I believe that as a first at-

tempt to measure oral proficiency among bilingual children among rural indige-nous communities, the elaboration of a test with this kind of items was a significantmove toward culturally appropriate assessment of communicative abilities that al-lows for comparisons across linguistically diverse populations at the elemen-tary-school level.

THE ISSUE OF CROSS-LINGUISTIC

AND CROSS-CULTURAL VALIDITY

Cross-linguistic validity is not only a challenge when one is trying to elicit oral data


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ofQuechua-andAymara-speakingchildren,theteamofeducatorsandlinguistswhoworked on the CRECER 2000 project encountered a major problem in developing

aural comprehension items for the pilot testdeciding whether the texts would befirst generated in thecommon majority language (Spanish) and later translated intoQuechua or Aymara, or whether they would be generated in one of the indigenouslanguages and then translated into the other indigenous language and Spanish. Thedifferences ingrammatical structureat the sentential level andin textual structureatthe discourse level made the choiceeven more difficult because the translations hadtobeascloseaspossibletotheoriginaltextwhilerespectingthetextualstructureas-sociated to narratives in each languagetradition. The team decided to havedifferentitems generated in one of the three languages and then translated into the others to

minimizetheeffectofaone-waytranslationpracticeinallitems.Topreservethecul-turalandenvironmentalappropriatenessofthetest,theteamalsodecidedtoincorpo-rateelementsof thechildrens environmentsuchas pet animalsandtraditional shortstories. Translating the texts was particularly difficult because there were only fewbilingual indigenous researchers andeducators who were available to work with usgenerating items. The situation was further complicated by the fact that cross-lin-guistic validity between the texts generated in the two indigenous languages couldbe checked by only one of the consultant educators who is trilingual in Quechua,Aymara,andSpanish.Thiseducatorwasalsothepersonwhorecordedthetextsinthe

threelanguagestominimizetheeffectthatdifferencesintherecordingmayhavehadin the results of the sample group.

The following example corresponds to a text used to measure specific listeningcomprehension skills listed in the official curricular document: identifying themain topic of a text and identifying characters, actions, or events. The children lis-tened to a taped version of the text in their native language (Quechua or Aymara),and they answered questions about the text in their native language. Subsequently,they listened to another text recorded in Spanish and answered questions about it.The childrens answers were recorded to be later evaluated by judges according to

a rubric of the same type as the one used for oral descriptions. The Spanish textwith an English translation is presented here, and the Quechua and Aymara ver-sions follow.

Spanish

Un da, en un pueblo lejano, Luis encontr un pequeo jilguero. El pajarillo tenala patita rota y estaba tirado en el suelo. Luis lo recogi y se lo llev a su casa. All

le cur la patita y le dio quinua cocida y agua.Al da siguiente, Luis les cont a sus compaeros lo sucedido con el pajarito.

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1. De qu trata este cuento?2. Qu le pasaba al jilguero?

3. Qu hizo Luis?

English

One day, in a far away village, Luis found a little bird. The little bird had a brokenleg and was abandoned on the floor. Luis picked it up and took it tohis home. Therehe cured his leg and gave him cooked quinoa and water.

The next day, Luis told his classmates what had happened with the bird. Sincethat day the little bird lives with Luis and wakes him up with his songs.

Now, answer these questions:

1. What is this story about?2. What happened to the little bird?3. What did Luis do?

Quechua

Huk punchawsi karu llaqtakunapi, Luwisqa huk chaya pisquchata tarikusqa.

Pisquqchakinsipakiqakasqa,hinas pampapiwikchulayasqa.Luwisqapisquchatahuqariykuspaswasinmanaparitakapusqa,chaypi;aschakintahampirkuspa.Kiwinapisqita mihurachispa unuta upyahisqa. Paqaristinataqsi Luwisqa yachay wasipi,yachaq masinkunaman, pisquchaq imanasqanta willakusqa.

Chay punchawmantapachas pisquchaqa Luwiswan tiyapusqa, hinallataqsitakiyninwan sapa paqariy Luwistaqa rikcharichin.

Kunan kay tapukuykunata kutichiy.

1. Imamantataq kay willakuyririman?

2. Imanasqataq pisquchatari?3. Imatataq Luwisri rurasqa?

Aymara

Maya uruxa, maya jaya markana, Luwisuxa maya jiska chaya jamachijakitayna. Jamachixa kayu pakitawa, uraqiru lipxatata jaqusiskatayna.Luwisuxa aptasina utaparawa apasxatayna, ukanxa kayupa chuqantayna, ukatxajiwra phatampi, umampi churatayna. Qhipa uruxa Luwisuxa yatia utana yatiqiri

masinakaparuwa, kunasa jamachiru kamachatayna, uka yatiyatayna. Ukaurutpacha jamachixa Luwisumpiwa utji, ukhamarusa, chiwipampipuniwa sapa


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1. Kunxatsa aka jawarixa parlixa?2. Kamachataynasa chaya jamachiruxa?

3. Kunsa Luwisuxa luratayna?

As in the case of the picture-based description task, in this aural comprehensiontask the same holistic approach to grading was used by the judges. This constitutedthe first time that such aural comprehension items were administered to bilingualchildren, although in a pilot test, by the Ministry of Education in Peru. They werean important step toward measuring oral competencies among indigenous childrenin a communicative and culturally appropriate manner, and they incorporatedsome level of balance across languages. To avoid biases due to differences in tex-

tual structure and in narrative traditions, the items were constructed in the indige-nous languages and in the dominant language. They were constructed by nativespeakers of the indigenous languages who are bilingual (or even trilingual in onecase) themselves, and they contained evidential and aspectual markers required inthe indigenous languages but not in Spanish.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

In this article, I have presented a brief overview of some approaches to data collec-tion techniques in the field of bilingualism and SLA research and some currentviews on how to assess the linguistic competence of minority bilingual childrenfrom rural indigenous communities in Peru. From the field of early bilingual ac-quisition and some areas of SLA research comes a tradition of data collection thatprivileges oral production data over traditional written tests. These traditions coin-cide with current views in the field of language education for minorities. Re-searchers in this field propose moving away from traditional psychometric modelsof language testing (Shohamy, 2000; Valds & Figueroa, 1994) and focusing on

language assessment techniques that incorporate information about the childrenslinguistic environments, as well as measure their actual proficiency in the lan-guages that they speak.

This article presented examples of language assessment tools that can be usedby bilingualism and SLA researchers and educators to determine different aspectsof bilingual oral proficiency among rural indigenous populations such as socio-linguistic questionnaires and picture-based description and story-telling tasks.These examples show that written tests based on traditional psychometric modelsof language testing are not the only options available to researchers and educators

engaged in the assessment of communicative competencies among minority bilin-gual children living in rural environments, even if resources are scarce. The exam-

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article also addressed the issue of how to construct language assessment tools thatallow us to obtain cross-linguistically valid and comparable data for research and

educational assessment purposes in multilingual contexts.The implications of the assessment experiences presented in this article are

twofold. The cases presented illustrate how bilingualism and SLA research andlanguage testing can mutually benefit from sharing data collection and assessmenttechniques to measure bilingualism, particularly in areas such as the assessment ofaural and oral proficiency. They also open the path for a dialogue across disciplineson how to develop cross-linguistically and cross-culturally valid language assess-ment tools in multilingual contexts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Iwouldliketothankallthosewhoworkedinthedifferentresearchandlanguageas-sessmentprojectsthatIciteinthisarticle.IwouldliketoespeciallythankJorgePrezandMadeleineZigawithwhomIwasfortunatetoworkontwooftheprojects.Iamparticularly thankful to Jorge Prez for his comments on an earlier version. I wouldalso like to thank Santiago Cueto from GRADE in Peru and to Idelsa Mestas andNellyRamosfortheirdedicationtothecross-linguisticvalidationofitemsinQuech-ua and Aymara. Thanks also to the members of the Unidad de Educacin Bilinge(UNEBI), now the Direccin Nacional de Educacin Bilingue, Ministry of Educa-tion, Peru, for their support on different projects. I am also indebted to RicardoCuenca and Roland Baecker in Plan Nacional de Capacitacin Docente-DeutscheGesellschaft fr Technische Zusammenarbeit-Kreditanstatt fr Wiederaufbau(PLANCAD-GTZ-KfW) for their support for the Zuiga et. al. (2000) project.Thanks also to all the children who participated in the different projects. Finally,thanks to two anonymous reviewers and to Usha Lakshmanan for their commentsand suggestions. All errors are mine.

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Zuiga, M., Snchez, L., & Zacharas, D. (2000). Lenguas Indgenas y castellano en el sur andino:Necesidad y demanda de educacin bilinge.Lima, Per: Ministerio de Educacin, GTZ (GermanCooperation Agency), and KfW (Germanys Financial Cooperation).

APPENDIX

Sample Sociolinguistic Questionnaire1. School_______________________________2. Type of school

a. complete (all grades)b. multigradec. one teacher for all grades

3. Grade_______________________________________4. Childs name____________________________________

5. Age ___________________________________________6. Do you speak (native language)?

a. yesb. no

7. Do you understand (native language)?a. yesb. no

8. Do you speak (socially dominant language)?a. yes

b. no9. Do you understand (socially dominant language)?

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10. Which was your first language?a. native language

b. dominant languagec. both

11. When did you start speaking the native language?a. less than 3 yearsb. 37 yearsc. 712 yearsd. more than 12 years

12. At home, who speaks the native language?a. father

b. motherc. older siblingsd. younger siblingse. grandfatherf. grandmotherg. uncle or aunth. other

13. Who speaks to you in the native language?a. father


14. To whom do you speak in the native language?a. father


15. How often do you speak the native language at home?a. all the time

b. very oftenc. seldom


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a. native languageb. dominant language

c. both17.Whenyouspeakwithyourrelatives,in which languagedoyouspeakmoreoften?

a. native languageb. dominant languagec. both

18. And, when you talk with your friends, in which language do you speak moreoften?

a. native languageb. dominant language

c. both19. Which language do you prefer to tell stories or jokes ?


20. When did you start speaking the dominant language?a. less than 3 yearsb. 37 yearsc. 712 years

d. more than 12 years21. Who speaks the dominant language at home?

a. fatherb. motherc. older siblingsd. younger siblingse. grandfatherf. grandmotherg. uncle or aunt

h. other22. Who speaks to you in the dominant language?

a. fatherb. motherc. older siblingsd. younger siblingse. grandfatherf. grandmotherg. uncle or aunt

h. other23. To whom do you speak in the dominant language?

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c. older siblingsd. younger siblings

e. grandfatherf. grandmotherg. uncle or aunth. other

24. How often do you speak the dominant language at home?a. all the timeb. very oftenc. seldomd. never

25. And in the school, in which language do you speak more often?a. native languageb. dominant languagec. both

26. Who speaks to you in the native language in school?a. the teachersb. the classmatesc. the teaching aidsd. other

27. To whom do you speak in the native language?a. the teachersb. the classmatesc. the teaching aidsd. other

28. How often does your teacher speak the native language in the classroom?a. all the timeb. very oftenc. seldom

d. never29. How often do you speak the native language in the classroom?

a. all the timeb. Very oftenc. seldomd. never

30. Who speaks to you in the dominant language in school?a. the teachersb. the classmates

c. the teaching aidsd. other


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b. the classmatesc. the teaching aids

d. other32. How often does your teacher speak the dominant language in the classroom?

a. all the timeb. very oftenc. seldomd. never

33. How often do you speak the native language in the classroom?a. all the timeb. very often

c. seldomd. never

34. In which language do you answer your teachers questions in the classroom ?a. native languageb. dominant languagec. both

35. In which language is it easier for you to understand your teacher?a. native languageb. dominant language

c. both36. In which language do you read more often in the classroom?


37. In which language do you write more often in the classroom?a. native languageb. dominant languagec. both

38. In which language do you speak to your classmates in the classroom?a. native languageb. dominant languagec. both

39. In which language do you speak to your classmates during recess?a. native languageb. dominant languagec. both

40. Besides home and school, where do you spend more time?

a. fieldsb. church or temple

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