Meeting the Needs of All Emergent Bilinguals with a Reliable, High-Quality Assessment

With a large population of Emergent Bilingual (EB) students, McAllen ISD, located in South Texas along the border of Texas and Mexico, requires an assessment instrument that serves multiple purposes: identification of EBs in all grade levels, progress monitoring of the youngest students, and a reliable measurement of dual language proficiency for students seeking the LOTE credit. In this success story, Rocío Nava, Director for Bilingual/ESL and Foreign Languages Department, shares how McAllen ISD uses PreLAS® and LAS Links® to provide consistent, high-quality feedback that meets the varying needs of teachers and students across their bilingual, ESL, and dual language programs.

How is LAS Links used in your organization?

LAS Links assessments are used for the identification of EB students in grades PK3-years old through 12th grade. We also use PreLAS to monitor progress in PK and K. In addition, we use LAS Links to monitor proficiency in English and Spanish for dual language students in fifth grade who are seeking the LOTE credit.

What Emergent Bilingual challenges do you have in your district/schools?

One of our challenges is differentiating instruction for students in the secondary level to meet the needs of the different proficiency levels. We offer professional learning on instructional strategies and different resources to meet the needs of our Emergent Bilingual students.

Why does your district choose to use LAS Links?

It is a reliable assessment and provides consistency with identification of EB students. It is also a reliable source to measure language growth for dual language programs. In addition, we are able to use the results from LAS Links Español as a data point to award our dual language students the level 1 LOTE credit.

Which features are particularly important to your organization? How do they address specific concerns and needs?

We like to have consistency in the assessment instrument and its grading. LAS Links offers that for us. It is also very user friendly to train new staff to administer the assessments.

What strategic plans do you have in mind as you move forward with LAS Links progress monitoring?

We plan to continue with our current practices. LAS Links is a reliable and quality assessment that provides the data we need to help our students and our teachers be successful, and the customer service is great!

LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH (LOTE) CREDIT

According to the Texas Administrative Code Chapter 74, Subchapter B, to successfully complete a dual language immersion program, a student must meet three requirements including: “achieve proficiency in both English and a language other than English as demonstrated by scores of proficient or higher in the reading and speaking domains on a language proficiency or achievement tests in both languages” (page 8).

The LAS Links English and LAS Links Español Reading and Speaking domains may be utilized to satisfy the language proficiency data points needed to meet this requirement.