Why José can't get in the gifted class: The bilingual child and standardized reading tests

Many potentially gifted Hispanic bilingual children are never considered for mainstream gifted programs due to mediocre performance on standardized reading tests. This paper considers factors other than poor reading ability which may account for poor test scores. It examines the nature of second language learning and its relation to (a) the type of language processing required by a reading test and (b) the strategies bright bilingual children appear to be using which may have a negative effect on test performance. Specifically, it relates the processes of instantiation of word meaning (Anderson et al., 1976) and overreliance on prior knowledge to reading comprehension errors.