A Project To Develop a Measure of English Language Proficiency. Final Report

A project to develop a measure of English language proficiency (MELP) for use in a national survey of income and education, to estimate the number of people of limited English proficiency, is reported. The preferred form of the instrument was a short series of questions to be asked by an interviewer and answered by an adult member of a household. Principle activities in the project were: (1) development of possible MELP questions; and (2) criterion instruments against which to validate them; (3) field-testing of MELP questions in several ethnic groups; (4) analysis of resulting data to select the best questions for survey use; (5) derivation of scoring keys to translate any pattern of responses into language proficiency categorization; and (6) examination of methodological questions concerning surveys of populations whose native language is not English. A set of about 10 questions were selected for inclusion in the MELP, based on high correlation with respondents' performances on a developed test of English proficiency and on school language proficiency classifications. Slightly different questions were chosen for adults and children. The report describes, in some detail, the procedures used, results obtained, and conclusions drawn. Appended materials include data from analyses, and other supplementary material. (MSE)