Language Growth in Bilingual Children 

We are excited to report that our first group of children has completed the study! They began participating in fall of 2023, as new kindergarteners, and finished up the project at the end of their first grade year. Our second group of participants is finishing their first (kindergarten) year of the project, and will continue next year while they're in first grade. With these first two groups, we have shown that several different dynamic and processing-based tasks are feasible for children with different amounts of English exposure.

We are working to show the reliability of each of our tasks. That means they are consistent in what they measure, and it's an important step in evaluating a new assessment. So far, the majority of our tasks are internally consistent, meaning they measure the same thing throughout the task. We are also working on seeing how consistent the tasks are with each other, in the results they provide for an individual child.

We have developed a narrative dynamic assessment task that looks like a promising assessment option. It is reliable and captures children's performance well. We still need to see if it predicts language growth.

We are continuing to identify more participants so that we have enough children to support conclusions about our tasks.

We are working on analyzing data from our first two groups of children on their language growth during the study. Then later we will be able to look at how well our assessment tasks predict this language growth.