The Reading Warehouse

Sold in a package of 20 forms, these three English subtests are a part of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA), a language assessment for use with children ages 4 through 6 years who have varying degrees of bilingualism. Standardized and norm-referenced, the subtests take about 15 minutes each and address the key domains of morphosyntax, semantics, and phonology.

• BESA Phonology Subtest. A single-word phonological assessment, the English measure of this subtest assesses phonological production of 31 English words. When conducted with the Spanish measure (learn more here), this subtest is designed to differentially diagnose typical from atypical phonological skills in Spanish-English bilingual children.


• BESA Morphosyntax Subtest. This subtest employs cloze and sentence repetition tasks to target grammatical morphemes and sentence structures that were predicted to be difficult for children with language impairment in English. A grammatical cloze subscore, a sentence repetition subscore, and a total score that is a composite of those two subscores are derived.


• BESA Semantics Subtest. This subtest targets six tasks: analogies, characteristic properties, categorization, functions, linguistic concepts, and similarities and differences. The English semantics subtest has a total of 25 items: 10 receptive and 15 expressive. Subscores are provided for semantics receptive and semantics expressive, as well as a total semantics score for each language.

• identify phonological and/or language impairment in bilingual children and English language learners using a standardized protocol
• differentiate between a delay in English language acquisition and a true language disorder
• document children's speech and language strengths and needs
• monitor children's progress in both languages and use the information to make decisions about intervention