Development and validation of the Spanish-English language proficiency scale (SELPS)

Purpose: This study examined the development and validation of a criterion-referenced Spanish-English Language Proficiency Scale (SELPS) that was designed to assess the oral language skills of sequential bilingual children ages 4-8. This article reports results for the English proficiency portion of the scale. Method: The SELPS assesses syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, verbal fluency, and lexical diversity based on 2 story retell tasks. In Study 1, 40 children were given 2 story retell tasks to evaluate the reliability of parallel forms. In Study 2, 76 children participated in the validation of the scale against language sample measures and teacher ratings of language proficiency. Results: Study 1 indicated no significant differences between the SELPS scores on the 2 stories. Study 2 indicated that the SELPS scores correlated significantly with their counterpart language sample measures. Correlations between the SELPS and teacher ratings were moderate. Conclusions: The 2 story retells elicited comparable SELPS scores, providing a valuable tool for test-retest conditions in the assessment of language proficiency. Correlations between the SELPS scores and external variables indicated that these measures assessed the same language skills. Results provided empirical evidence regarding the validity of inferences about language proficiency based on the SELPS score.