One out of every four kindergartners in the United States is Latino, making bilingual communities like we have in Southern Arizona the norm, rather than the exception.
Tucson is also a refugee resettlement city where preschools and elementary schools are infused with speakers of a variety of languages in addition to English and Spanish.
What happens when bilingual children encounter a school system that was designed for children who speak only English? I tackle this question through science and community outreach.
Latino children are four times more likely to be identified as having a speech disorder than their white, English-speaking peers.
The reason we see such a disproportionate number of Latino children receiving speech-therapy services is due to how speech-language pathologists evaluate the speech of bilingual children.
The tools and measures we use were designed for children who speak just one language — English.
When bilingual children are tested in only English, they are, in effect, being tested on only half of their language skills.
As a result, their speech skills appear weaker than those of their monolingual, English-speaking peers.
To solve this problem, I examined routine tools and measures for bias and developed assessment procedures for both English and Spanish that will accurately reflect the speech skills of bilingual children. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
I found that assessing both languages of the bilingual child results in a more accurate diagnosis of speech disorders.
Furthermore, I am in the process of identifying a set of English and Spanish measures that accurately identify bilingual children with, and without, speech disorders.
Why is correctly identifying speech disorders so important for bilingual children?
Children who are identified as having a speech disorder are often taken from class to receive speech-therapy services one-on-one with a speech-language pathologist.
For children who truly have disorders, this is a good thing. Children need a quiet room to focus on improving their speech skills and individualized attention to address their disability.
However, for children who have typical speech skills, but are mislabeled as having a disorder, being removed from class for unnecessary therapy results in missing out on general education curriculum. This results in educational disparities for bilingual Latino children compared with their monolingual English-speaking peers.
Conversely, if children do, indeed, have a speech or language disorder, but are not accurately identified by a speech-language pathologist, they may have full access to the general-education curriculum, but they are not receiving the speech therapy services they need to develop age-appropriate communication skills.
This results in a health disparity for bilingual Latino children — and for bilingual children who speak languages other than Spanish — because our tests don’t miss monolingual English-speaking children with speech disorders. Our bilingual children with speech disorders, however, are overlooked.
My research program focuses on reducing educational and health disparities for bilingual children, using Tucson as a model for procedures that will be implemented nationwide.
The collaboration among the University of Arizona, the Sunnyside Unified School District and bilingual speech-language pathologists in the greater Tucson area has already improved the way our schools evaluate and diagnose bilingual children with speech disorders.
This partnership continues to improve the lives of bilingual children and their families, with the goal of equitable education and access to special-education services for all of Tucson’s children.
