Mateo: Is It Dyslexia, Second-Language Acquisition, or Interrupted Schooling?
Mateo is 7 and moved from rural Guatemala 14 months ago. He attended school there for two years, intermittently, in a multiage classroom with few books. He now holds conversational English with peers but reads at an early-first-grade level on the district's English inventory; Spanish reading is comparable. His teacher reports he substitutes /t/ for /th/, drops final consonants, and confuses b and d, and asks whether this is dyslexia. Vision and hearing screenings are current and within normal limits. The only Spanish-speaking staff member is an office aide with no interpreter training. The prereferral team meets in three weeks, and the principal wants "the testing done now" so services can begin before winter break.
1. Before the prereferral team meets, what information would you gather, and how would you sequence the three weeks? Explain what each data source is meant to rule in or rule out.
Read the worked answer
Frame the problem first. The referral question ("is this dyslexia?") cannot be answered until three confounded explanations are separated: limited English proficiency, limited or interrupted formal schooling, and a possible reading disability. Every data source below exists to disconfirm one of those alternatives, not to confirm a diagnosis.
Week 1 - History and opportunity to learn
- Records from Guatemala: years attended, language of instruction, whether he received any systematic literacy instruction.
- Structured family interview with a qualified interpreter (not a dual-role office aide if avoidable; if not, use a scripted protocol and document the limitation): home languages, book and print exposure, developmental milestones, family history of reading difficulty, health, trauma/transience.
- Attendance and a log of the explicit phonics instruction he has actually received in English. A student cannot be found SLD if the core cause is inadequate instruction.
Weeks 1–2 - Language data in both languages
- Academic language measures, not playground English. Conversational proficiency typically emerges in one to three years; academic language takes five to seven. Compare phonological awareness and decoding in Spanish, where he has more exposure. The most diagnostic question is whether the weakness appears in both languages.
- Confirm hearing again if any inconsistency; screening at age 7 can miss fluctuating loss.
Week 2–3 - Classroom evidence
- Running records across genres, work samples, error analysis, and Tier 1 quality checks.
What I would not do: administer an English-normed ability/achievement battery now and use a discrepancy to declare SLD. Those scores would be confounded by language and schooling and would not survive team scrutiny. Instead I would bring a hypothesis-organized data summary, launch a 6–8 week Tier 2 intervention with weekly progress monitoring, and propose a written decision rule for the next meeting.
2. Which error patterns and history factors would move you toward a reading disability, and which toward typical second-language and schooling effects? Be specific about why single signs are weak evidence.
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Toward a language/literacy experience explanation
- Errors traceable to Spanish phonology: /t/ for /th/ (Spanish has no /θ/), epenthesis in /s/ clusters ("school" → "eschool"), final consonant reduction, vowel shortening.
- Stronger performance in Spanish than English, with progress tracking exposure.
- Gaps in book experience and attendance that plausibly account for vocabulary and background-knowledge gaps.
- Good response to vocabulary and oral-language support even when decoding lags.
Toward a disability
- Persistent phonological weakness in both languages, including Spanish, after explicit instruction.
- Poor rapid automatized naming, difficulty retaining letter–sound correspondences across weeks, flat response to a genuinely intensive Tier 2 dose.
- A pattern of errors that is not characteristic of Spanish-influenced English and that persists while oral English grows.
- Documented family history of reading difficulty.
Why single signs mislead: b/d confusion is common in all children through roughly age seven to eight and in children learning a new orthography; it is not diagnostic. Substituting /t/ for /th/ is a predictable accent feature, not a decoding error. Nonword reading, often used to isolate decoding, is itself affected by unfamiliar phonology in a second-language learner. Low scores on English-normed tests partly measure English, not reading.
The judgment I would defend to the team: no single error or score decides this. The discriminator is the cross-linguistic pattern plus the response to instruction, gathered over time, not a snapshot.
3. The principal wants testing finished before winter break. How do you respond, and where is the line between reasonable urgency and premature identification?
Read the worked answer
Acknowledge the legitimate instinct. Fourteen months is not "just arrived," and using "wait and see" as a way to avoid serving a child is a real and common failure. Delay has costs: instructional time, self-concept, and family trust.
Separate three things that the principal is merging.
- Support now - Tier 2 intervention and classroom accommodations can begin this week with no evaluation and no eligibility label.
- Evaluation - a comprehensive evaluation can be initiated and completed within the legal timeline; nothing about my data-gathering plan requires delaying the referral.
- Labeling - the specific question "dyslexia" should not be answered with data that cannot distinguish it from language acquisition; a wrong label can follow a child for years and can also mask needed English-learner services.
Concrete response:"I will not wait a year, and I will not diagnose in three weeks. Here is what we can do: start intervention Monday with weekly progress monitoring, convene on the scheduled date with a hypothesis-organized data summary, and open a formal referral now if the team's existing data support suspected disability." Then document the sequence and the rationale.
Watch for a trigger that changes the analysis: if the parent requests an evaluation in writing, the district's timeline starts and the conversation shifts from sequencing to compliance. The right move then is to begin the evaluation promptly and design it so it is valid - native-language and English measures, interpreter support, and interpretive caution - rather than to substitute a rushed English-only battery.