BESA Protocol, Spanish

Sold in a package of 20 forms, these three Spanish subtests are a part of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA), a language assessment for use with children ages 4 through 6 years who have varying degrees of bilingualism. Standardized and norm-referenced, the subtests take about 15 minutes each and address the key domains of morphosyntax, semantics, and phonology.

• BESA Phonology Subtest. A single-word phonological assessment, the Spanish measure of this subtest assesses phonological production of 28 Spanish words. When conducted with the English measure (learn more here), this subtest is designed to differentially diagnose typical from atypical phonological skills in Spanish-English bilingual children.
• BESA Morphosyntax Subtest. This subtest employs cloze and sentence repetition tasks to target grammatical morphemes and sentence structures that were predicted to be difficult for children with language impairment in Spanish. A grammatical cloze subscore, a sentence repetition subscore, and a total score that is a composite of those two subscores are derived.
• BESA Semantics Subtest. This subtest targets six tasks: analogies, characteristic properties, categorization, functions, linguistic concepts, and similarities and differences. The Spanish semantics subtest has a total of 25 items: 12 receptive and 13 expressive. Subscores are provided for semantics receptive and semantics expressive, as well as a total semantics score for each language.

ABOUT BESA
A valid and reliable assessment that specifically responds to the needs of young Spanish-English bilingual children, BESA was developed to:

• identify phonological and/or language impairment in bilingual children and English language learners using a standardized protocol
• differentiate between a delay in English language acquisition and a true language disorder
• document children's speech and language strengths and needs
• monitor children's progress in both languages and use the information to make decisions about intervention

Through a combination of subtests for students and surveys for teachers and parents, BESA reveals the big picture of a young bilingual child's language development. Learn more about BESA here.