Culturally Responsive Assessment and Intervention for Diverse Learners

In classrooms across the US, students bring rich linguistic repertoires that reflect their cultural identities, home communities, and lived experiences. Yet too often, assessment practices frame this linguistic diversity not as a resource but as a problem to be remediated. The consequences are profound: students who are multilingual, who use varieties of English that differ from dominant norms, or who navigate the intersection of linguistic difference and dis/ability, encounter systems that conflate linguistic variation with disorder and elevate standardization over validity. These practices are not neutral. Assessment outcomes determine access to services, shape educational trajectories, and influence how students come to understand themselves as learners and language users. When assessments fail to distinguish variation from disorder, they threaten not only equity but the construct validity of the measures themselves (Oetting, 2018). At the heart of this issue lies a fundamental tension that has persisted across speech-language pathology, education, and literacy research: Is assessment primarily a gatekeeping mechanism designed to sort and exclude, or can it be reimagined as a tool that supports understanding, growth, and opportunity? As our nation’s classrooms grow increasingly diverse, with students of color now comprising the majority of K-12 enrollment and millions speaking languages other than English at home, this question is no longer theoretical but practical and urgent (National Center for Education Statistics, 2024). These challenges unfold within real constraints, as clinicians and educators are tasked with making high-stakes decisions with limited time and resources and often unclear or contradictory policy mandates. Reimagining assessments and interventions, therefore, requires both conceptual clarity and practical feasibility. It requires attending not only to how students are assessed, but to how the practices that follow (eg, instruction, intervention, and clinical support) are designed to build on, rather than suppress, students’ full linguistic repertoires. This special issue of Topics in Language Disorders advances the position that literacy assessment and intervention must be reimagined in not only what we measure, but in how and why we measure it. The 4 articles that follow represent intentional, interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of speech-language pathology, education, and literacy studies. Together, they challenge deficit-oriented frameworks that have long shaped approaches to assessment for culturally and linguistically diverse students. The contributors foreground culturally responsive, asset-based perspectives that recognize the full linguistic repertoires of students who are multilingual, who speak varieties such as African American English and Southern American English that differ from dominant school norms, and who have been identified with language and learning differences. Critically, this issue treats assessment and intervention not as separate enterprises but as interconnected practices, both shaped by the same frameworks that have historically failed culturally and linguistically diverse learners, and both in need of the same reimagining. Gatlin-Nash and colleagues open the issue by examining how dialect features appear in elementary students’ written and oral language across contexts, offering an empirical and pedagogical foundation for the contributions that follow. Focusing on a sample of 250 second- and third-grade students in the southeastern US, the authors analyze the frequency and distribution of features associated with African American English and Southern American English across 2 written genres, narrative and expository, as well as in oral language samples. Their findings reveal that dialect use in writing is neither random nor simply a spillover from speech—the majority of students who used dialect features orally also produced at least 1 dialect feature in their writing, yet dialect density varied by genre, with students producing more dialect features in narrative writing than in expository writing. Importantly, the study documents that dialect use in writing extended beyond African American students, a finding that challenges the common research practice of examining dialect use only within racially homogeneous samples, and this has direct implications for how broadly practitioners need to develop dialect awareness. The article concludes with implications for teacher reflection and professional learning, arguing that educators must be equipped to distinguish language difference from language disorder and to respond to student writing in ways that are linguistically informed and instructionally supportive. In doing so, this contribution reinforces the issue’s broader call for assessment and interpretation practices that are both culturally responsive and pedagogically grounded. In the next article, Johnson and colleagues take up the question of what happens when standardized scoring systems encounter dialect features that appear systematically in students’ writing. Writing metrics such as correct minus incorrect writing sequences are widely used for screening and progress monitoring, but their norming on general American English conventions means that dialect features in student writing are treated as errors rather than as evidence of a rule-governed linguistic system, inadvertently penalizing students whose linguistic practices differ from dominant academic norms. Drawing on a convergence of DisCrit and QuantCrit frameworks and the disorder within diversity perspective, the authors investigate whether conventional correct minus incorrect writing sequence scoring practices introduce systematic bias for students who use nonmainstream American English features in their writing. Through empirical comparison of conventional and modified scoring procedures, the study demonstrates that culturally responsive adjustments to scoring can reduce differential penalty without diminishing the measure’s sensitivity to writing productivity or overall performance. A further intersectional analysis revealed that the effects of modified scoring were not uniform across student subgroups, with male students using nonmainstream American English features showing slightly larger gains, highlighting the multiplicative nature of how bias operates in assessment. By showing that bias reduction and psychometric integrity are not mutually exclusive, this article advances a core argument of the issue—that assessment tools and practices can be redesigned to better reflect students’ linguistic repertoires while maintaining rigor and utility in school-based decision-making. Wang et al next examine how complex syntax instruction can simultaneously support verb morphology development in young children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The study draws on data from preschool and early elementary-aged children (4-7 years) who participated in a science-based teletherapy intervention targeting complement clauses. By analyzing the linguistic input provided through clinician modeling and recasting, the authors demonstrate that instruction centered on clausal subordination naturally generates dense exposure to tense morphology. The findings highlight how an intervention embedded within academic content can address foundational grammatical weaknesses that directly affect children’s participation in classroom discourse and literacy. Importantly, this work aligns closely with a commitment to culturally sustaining and linguistically responsive practice. The authors situate morphosyntactic intervention within a dialect-informed framework, emphasizing that effective grammar intervention must respect and build upon children’s home language varieties rather than pathologize difference. By outlining how complement clause and tense morphology exposure can be accomplished across dialects of English, the article advances an intervention model that is both evidence-based and culturally sensitive. As part of the intervention section of this issue, this study offers clinicians practical guidance while reinforcing the importance of designing grammar instruction that supports linguistic diversity and academic access simultaneously. Finally, Hines and Wood address a pressing need in speech-language pathology: identifying effective and efficient grammar interventions for Spanish-English multilingual learners with and without DLD in the upper elementary grades. Focusing on third- through fifth-grade students, the study compares implicit and explicit instructional approaches for teaching English past tense -ed and third-person singular -s, morphemes that are widely recognized as clinical markers of DLD yet remain particularly challenging for multilingual learners. Using an adapted alternating treatments design, the authors examine not only whether students improve, but also how quickly and under what instructional conditions gains occur. By analyzing trained and untrained verbs, mastery rates, and efficiency indices, the study provides a nuanced view of responsiveness to intervention across diverse learner profiles. Rather than conflating bilingual language development with disorder, the authors situate morphosyntactic instruction within a framework that recognizes cross-linguistic influence, distributed knowledge across languages, and the construct of disorder within difference. The findings suggest that both implicit and explicit approaches can support morphological growth, although patterns of responsiveness vary by individual characteristics such as DLD status and cognitive profile. As part of the intervention section of this issue, this article contributes preliminary but meaningful evidence toward a “what works for whom” model of grammar intervention—one that centers multilingual learners’ linguistic realities while striving for equitable, evidence-based practice. Across these contributions, a central tension emerges: How do we design assessment and intervention practices that honor linguistic variation as a strength while also supporting students in meeting academic and clinical expectations? How do we resist one-size-fits-all definitions of “risk” or “disorder” that fail to account for the intersectional identities students hold? The work presented in this issue does not claim to resolve these tensions entirely. Rather, it offers rigorous empirical evidence, practical tools, and conceptual frameworks that move the field closer to equitable, responsive practice. In assembling this collection, our goal has been to support practitioners, researchers, and policymakers in developing approaches that are not only evidence-based and rigorous but also justice-oriented. If assessment determines opportunity, then its design is never neutral. It reflects what a field values, whose language practices are legitimized, and which learners are afforded support. This issue invites readers to reconsider not whether we assess and intervene, but how and toward what ends. Lindy Johnson Dr. Kiana HinesMichigan State UniversityEast Lansing, MIIssue Editors