Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

The Development Of The Bilingual Special Education Field: Major Issues, Accomplishments, Future Directions, And Recommendations, Chun Zhang, Su-Je Choh

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

In this paper, we review various challenges in regard to educating children with and without disabilities from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. The challenges discussed include (1) biased assessment that results in mis- or overrepresenting CLD students in special education, (2) difficulty distinguishing between disability and differences, and (3) lack of competent bilingual special educators. As recommended practices, we propose to use the response to intervention model in identifying and instructing CLD children with and without disabilities. We point out that future research should examine how collaborative service delivery models contribute to referrals of CLD children into special education …