Multilingual Assessment.

PI: Dr. Gita Martohardjono

Project Director: Dr. Jennifer Chard

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The Multilingual Literacy SIFE Screener (MLS) is an online, semi-adaptive suite of assessments designed to provide educators in New York State with information about the home-language literacy and math skills of Students with Interrupted/Inconsistent Formal Education (SIFE). The MLS is part of New York State’s SIFE Identification Process and is featured prominently on NYSED’s Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages SIFE Resources website. It is strongly recommended for all New York state schools. The MLS provides teachers with an automatically generated summary of students’ home language literacy skills so that teachers can design instruction appropriately. The MLS has four modules: Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary, Early Literacy and Mathematics, and is available in 16 languages: Arabic, Bangla, Burmese, Chinese, English, French, Fula, Haitian Creole, Maay-Maay, Nepali, Russian, S’gaw Karen, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, and Urdu. For more information please watch our webinar or the 2021 update webinar, describing the design features and administration of the MLS. The project is commissioned by the New York State Education Department Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages.

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The RISLUS Multilingual Syntax Test (RMST) assesses comprehension of complex syntactic structures in six languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Russian). Based on developmental milestones in acquisition, such as relatives clauses and sequence clauses, this test measures syntactic knowledge that is a pre-cursor to fluent reading beyond the sentence level. It is ideal for pre-literate, young children, or individuals without formal school in the language. The test is available on paper and, online, and has been adapted for use with an eye tracker.

The Referential Awareness Test (RAT) is a multilingual assessment which identifies a language user’s knowledge of noun classes (gender) and syntactic binding. The assessment is available in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese and is administered as a picture point task which does not require reading, making this ideal for pre-literate, young children, or individuals without formal schooling in the language. The test is available on paper, online, and has been adapted for use with an eye tracker.

PIs: Dr. Gita Martohardjono and Dr. Elaine Klein

The Academic Language And Literacy Diagnostic (ALLD) is a literacy diagnostic in English and Spanish. Developed by the Second Language Acquisition Lab and The Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) at The City University of New York Graduate Center it was commissioned by the New York City Department of Education’s Office of English Language Learners in 2008. The results of the ALLD offer educators detailed descriptions of a student’s skills and abilities in reading, vocabulary, and math. The ALLD modules are: Pre-Literacy, Word Study, Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension, Writing, and Math.