Using "Skilled Dialogue" in Your Interactions with Families
 From the October 2003 Early Childhood newsletter.
Isaura Barrera, Ph.D., has helped professionals working with families of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds understand one another with her book Skilled Dialogue: Strategies for Responding to Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood. In May, we featured a Q&A with Dr. Barrera who shared with us how Skilled Dialogue works for her.
Below, Dr. Barrera explains the third part of her book, which covers the 3 R's of Skilled Dialogue: Respect, Reciprocity, and Responsiveness.
In my book, Skilled Dialogue: Strategies for Responding to Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood, the third section outlines specific guidelines and strategies for applying Skilled Dialogue to assessment and intervention for young children from culturally and linguistically diverse environments. It is the belief of coauthors and myself that Skilled Dialogue must extend to the tasks and procedures that we use as well as to more general interactions with children and families.
At their core, assessment and intervention situations are dialogic. They are based on two-way communication, both verbal and non-verbal. This communication, like any other, becomes skilled to the degree that it can be characterized as respectful, reciprocal, and responsive. The third part of our book discusses several tools for increasing the respect, reciprocity, and responsiveness of both assessment and intervention situations. Three specific tools are identified and discussed: a Cultural Data Table, a Home Language Screen, and a Family Acculturation Screen. These tools are used to gather information for completing a Cultural Consonance Profile and subsequently developing a Cultural Linguistic Response Plan. Guidelines for using these tools are also discussed in the context of sample vignettes.
One of the most frequent challenges to respectful, reciprocal, and responsive assessment is the presence of a language other than English and the consequent need for differentiating between expected second language/bilingualism characteristics and characteristics indicative of probable communication delay or disorder. The issues involved in appropriately assessing and responding to the needs of children with suspected or identified exceptionalities who are also English language learners are not simple ones. The guidelines I've chosen to address cannot be covered in depth in this brief answer, so readers are referred to our book as well as to its cited references for further information and clarification. With that caveat, then, I would identify the following guidelines:
- Determine a child's relative language proficiency, that is, the child's proficiency in the language(s) other than English as well as in English. This is important for two reasons: to assess overall language skills rather than just language dominance, and to obtain critical information for determining whether exhibited limitations stem from English language learning characteristics or from underlying language delays/disorders, or both.
- Distinguish between situations in which language is a medium, such as teaching concepts, and situations in which language is an end in itself, like teaching the language itself. Learning a language and using that language to learn are distinct and can counteract each other when not carefully distinguished. For example, a child may be trying so hard to understand what is being said that attention to the concept being presented is reduced or not possible.
- Always mirror and validate existing language skills. Research indicates that strong skills in one language support development of skills in a second language. For example, it has been demonstrated that support of Spanish skills at home correlate highly with higher academic performance even when the academic environment is English monolingual.
  To learn more about cultural diversity in early childhood, check out Skilled Dialogue.
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