Migrant and seasonal agriculture workers, mostly of
Latino origin, largely supply the labor that goes into crop production,
cultivation, and harvest in the agricultural industry in the United States. A
major challenge of this population is having stable childcare and access to
quality education services for their children. Unfortunately, most assessments
overlook the various aspects of emergent bilingual children’s development,
leading to underestimation of their conceptual understandings and linguistic
skills. This calls for a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to
assessment. Three scoring methods have been identified as the most
appropriate ways to score linguistic capabilities in bilingual children:
single-language scoring, total scoring, and conceptual scoring (Bedore et al., 2005; Core et al., 2013). Each method
presents advantages and disadvantages and is used according to the questions
being asked. This longitudinal study aims to (1)
compare total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary in a group of two-year-old
emergent bilingual children across time, (2) compare total and conceptual
vocabulary with normed monolingual performance on a single-language measure
across time using total and conceptual scoring methods, and (3) to determine which
method of assessing vocabulary in two languages is most appropriate for
two-year-old migrant bilingual children. Eight
emergent bilingual children (50% female; Age: Time 1: M = 23.25 months, SD
= 3.34) attending the Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) or Redlands
Christian Migrant Association (RMCA) were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental
Inventory at three timepoints. Results showed that children’s total vocabulary scores were larger than their conceptual
vocabulary scores and when comparing to monolingual norms their total scores
were larger than their conceptual scores. Implications and recommendations will
be discussed further.
