Abstract:
The Oral Spanish Proficiency Placement Test is designed to place bilingual students at the appropriate level in the H200 curriculum materials. It is an individually administered test appropriate for students in grades K-5, but is said by the publisher to be appropriate for use with adults as well. In addition to being used for placement purposes, the test may be used for measuring achievement and language dominance. It is most often used with students who are bilingual in English and Spanish, but can be translated to accomodate any combination of languages. A Tagalog translation is available from the publisher. During test administration, which takes approximately 15 minutes, the examiner asks the student a series of questions in Spanish, most of which are keyed to a set of black line illustrations that are part of the testing materials. The student's reply is compared to a suggested answer and scored on the answer sheet as either correct or incorrect. The interview ends when the student responds incorrectly to several questions in a row. The total score is used to assign students to an instructional level, but can also be expressed as a grade equivalent. To establish language dominance, the test is given again immediately in the native language so that a comparison of scores can be made. Test-retest reliability was estimated as .85.