De Avila, Edward (1937-)

Edward De Avila is a developmental psychologist, researcher, and educator in the field of childhood English language development and language proficiency and educational group methods with children of diverse languages. His most notable contribution, in collaboration with Sharon Duncan, PhD, is in the measurement of English proficiency. The research by De Avila and Duncan established that the single most important variable for predicting the academic success of language minority students is linguistic proficiency. De Avila is also the former president of the Linguamet-rics Group and past president of De Avila, Duncan and Associates. This entry describes De Avila's contribution to bilingual assessment and education.

De Avila was born in 1937 to a Mexican-born father and a mother of Irish ancestry. When asked where he was born, his reply has always been “in a little town in Northern Mexico called Los Angeles.” De Avila grew up speaking Spanish, surrounded and supported by a large extended family on his father's side. He failed to complete high school; instead, he learned to be a draftsman. At work, his supervisors saw his potential and encouraged him to go to the city college. From there, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his BAin 1964. He completed his MA at Colorado State and obtained his PhD from York University in Toronto, Canada, in 1973. From childhood, he confronted and dealt with issues related to language, culture, family dynamics, and educational struggles and strivings. His interest in children and his pursuit of fairness and equal access to a good education for underserved and little-understood English language learners has guided much of his research and applied work. In 1966, he developed a child-friendly Piaget-driven test titled Cartoon Conservation Scales. While at Stanford University (1974–1978) as a senior research associate and visiting associate professor, he documented in Descubrimiento (1987) a system he developed for learning science and that he tested in bilingual cooperative learning groups in classrooms where English language learners and Spanish language learners were learning a second language from the process of interacting with one another.

De Avila is best known for the development of the English proficiency tests titled Language Assessment Scales (LAS), published in 1975, coauthored with Duncan. These sets of tests have become the benchmark for assessing English language proficiency in public and private school systems within and outside the United States. English proficiency is distinguished from English achievement in that the former is a measure of the functional level (grade level) at which the individual is speaking English. Although linguistic proficiency and academic skills are correlated, they are distinctly different. A child's English proficiency level would inform the teacher what the child is able to understand in a mainstream classroom with children of similar age. A key element of the LAS tests is the oral portion that requires the child, or adult, to spontaneously verbalize a narrative in response to a picture. Thus, an actual sample of speech is then categorized, scored, and placed in a spectrum of English proficiency.

...