Assessing the early literacy skills of young English learners: Use of DIBELS in Spanish

Mastery of basic reading skills is a critical goal for all students during early elementary years, yet many students experience difficulty in acquiring this basic skill. The goal of becoming a successful reader is particularly challenging for English learners. Fortunately, with early screening and effective interventions, almost all students can become successful readers. Accurate tools to help identify students early who are at risk for reading difficulties are especially important for the increasing number of young students with Spanish as a first language.;Phonemic awareness skills are important predictors of reading achievement and the skills necessary for success in learning to read in English. These skills can be evaluated with a measurement system known as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). These measures allow educators to evaluate students' early literacy skills and monitor their progress toward benchmark goals. These measures are conducted in English, however, and questions arise about their validity when used with young English learners. The goals of this study were to examine the reliability, validity, and sensitivity of DIBELS measures in Spanish; and to examine the contribution of Spanish DIBELS for evaluating English reading outcomes.;Participants in the study were 51 kindergarten and 43 first grade students with Spanish as a first language, who were learning to read in English, from two schools in Sonoma County, California. The results from the study indicate that the Spanish DIBELS measures displayed adequate reliability and validity for use in screening decisions and, when a pattern of performance on repeated measures was obtained, for making individual educational decisions. Spanish DIBELS also demonstrated sufficient sensitivity to be utilized for progress monitoring. Spanish and English DIBELS measures demonstrated a similar progression of early reading skills. In some instances, the Spanish early reading tasks were better able to predict English reading outcomes than the English versions. This may indicate that a foundation of reading awareness in a child's' first language plays an important role in later reading success in a second language. Strong evidence of cross-language transfer of early reading skills was also found.