TExES Bilingual Ed 164 common mistakes
TExES Bilingual Ed 164 · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Treating 'bilingual education' and 'ESL/English-only' program models as interchangeable when a scenario asks which placement is appropriate for a newcomer with strong L1 literacy.
Candidates study program labels as vocabulary lists and never build a decision rule for matching a student profile to a model, so they pick the model whose name sounds most supportive rather than the one that uses and develops L1.
What to do instead
Build a two-axis decision table: (a) does the model develop or merely tolerate the L1, and (b) is content delivered in L1? Then practice classifying 10 student vignettes into transitional, developmental/maintenance, two-way dual, or ESL-pull-out and justify each with the L1-use criterion.
Choosing an answer that says a child should be exited from bilingual services as soon as oral English sounds fluent.
Candidates conflate conversational fluency (BICS) with the academic language needed for content-area success, and exit criteria feel intuitive when a student 'sounds fine' in the hallway.
What to do instead
Memorize the BICS/CALP distinction and the typical 5-7 year timeline for academic language. For any exit-criteria item, require evidence of academic-language proficiency and multiple data sources (content assessments, writing samples), not just oral proficiency or a single score.
Misapplying the legal/consent requirements, e.g., saying a parent's refusal of bilingual services removes the district's obligation to provide language support or that districts may place ELs in special education before language screening.
Candidates memorize case names (Lau, Castañeda, Plyler) without the operational rule each one establishes, so they cannot map a procedural scenario onto the correct requirement.
What to do instead
Make a one-page chart pairing each key case/law with its concrete district obligation: Lau (no unsupported sink-or-swim), Castañeda (three-prong program adequacy test), Plyler (no denial based on immigration status), plus parental notification/consent and the rule that EL status must be ruled out before SPED referral. Drill scenario items against that chart.
Reducing the ELPS to 'teach English' and failing items that ask how content-area teachers must integrate language objectives into a math or science lesson.
Candidates from a generalist background read the ELPS as the ESL teacher's responsibility and miss that the standards bind all content teachers across the four language domains.
What to do instead
Practice writing a content objective plus a paired language objective (e.g., 'students will explain in writing the steps of...') for several TEKS content standards, and identify which language domain and proficiency level each activity targets.
Ignoring proficiency-level differentiation and assigning grade-level text with no scaffolds to a beginning-level EL, or conversely watering down content so far it no longer addresses the TEKS.
Candidates equate 'accommodation' with 'easier work' and have not practiced the distinction between modifying the language demands and modifying the content standard.
What to do instead
For a set of lesson excerpts, rewrite the task so the content standard stays intact while language demands are scaffolded (sentence frames, visuals, native-language preview, leveled text). Verify each rewrite still names the same TEKS.
Selecting an assessment accommodation that changes what is measured, such as reading the English reading-comprehension test aloud to an EL, or treating an EL's low score as evidence of a learning disability.
Candidates want to 'help' the student and pick the most generous-sounding accommodation without checking whether it invalidates the construct being tested.
What to do instead
Apply a construct-validity filter to every accommodation: ask 'does this still test the same skill?' Then practice the prereferral sequence for ELs (document language proficiency, intervention data, native-language and English data, exclude lack of instruction) before any SPED referral.
Designing a lesson that tests cultural knowledge (holidays, foods, idioms) rather than using students' cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge as a bridge to the standard.
Candidates interpret 'culturally responsive' as 'add a cultural artifact' and cannot distinguish surface-level celebration from using home knowledge as an instructional resource.
What to do instead
Rewrite activities so the home culture/language is a cognitive entry point (e.g., students compare measurement systems or narrative structures they know with the target concept). Check that the cultural element is doing instructional work, not just decorating the lesson.
Planning only for the ELs' needs and leaving the English-dominant peers in a dual-language or mainstream setting without a defined role, so the lesson is not actually a bilingual/co-taught design.
Candidates focus on the labeled 'bilingual student' and forget that effective bilingual and co-taught instruction requires planning for both language groups and both teachers' roles.
What to do instead
For each lesson plan, explicitly assign: what each language group does, what each teacher does, and how the two languages are used (preview, parallel, translanguaging). Write the co-teaching model (station, parallel, alternative) into the plan.
Confusing the roles and legal boundaries of the LPAC, the bilingual/ESL teacher, and campus administration, e.g., having the teacher alone make identification or exit decisions.
Candidates learn committee names as acronyms without the decision each body owns, so scenario items about who decides identification, placement, and reclassification get answered by role-guessing.
What to do instead
Build a decision-rights table: LPAC (identification, placement, exit, monitoring), teacher (instruction and data collection), administrator (program implementation and compliance). Then answer 'who decides?' items by matching the decision to the body, not to whoever is mentioned first.
Letting a single standardized test score, or an answer that says 'wait until the student learns more English,' drive reclassification and monitoring decisions.
Candidates default to the simplest data source and underestimate the multi-criteria requirement, and 'wait' feels cautious rather than noncompliant.
What to do instead
Memorize the exit/reclassification criteria as a checklist (English proficiency assessment plus teacher recommendation, classroom performance, and parent input where required) and the required monitoring period after exit. For any 'should we exit/monitor?' item, reject single-source answers and answers that delay services without data.