The second step to consider in a bilingual language assessment is to include informal assessment measures of language general and language-specific tasks. A language-specific task measures specific learned language skills such as knowledge of vocabulary or grammatical rules. These tasks give the clinician information about the child's previous knowledge of language skills that are usually not shared between the two languages of a bilingual child, since their proficiency language usually shows the higher language-specific skills. An example of language-specific tasks are vocabulary tests, analysis of sentence structure, or analysis of grammatical skills. 

         A language-general task refers to perceptual skills like processing mechanisms or cognitive skills that do not depend on accumulated language-specific knowledge and can potentially be shared between the two languages of a bilingual child. One of the most frequently used language-general tasks is the nonword repetition task, where you measure children’s accuracy in repeating nonsense words. This task has strong validity and requires less language-specific knowledge than a vocabulary test (Chiat,2015; Kohnert 2010; Thordardottir, 2014, 2015). Another example of a language-general task are describing a picture or telling or retelling a story. These tasks require some language-specific knowledge with the use of vocabulary or morphosyntax, but also require more language-general cognitive skills for understanding, analyzing, and sequencing. A test that includes more language-general tasks is less biased for a bilingual child. Understanding these tasks is important since not all bilingual children reach proficiency in both of these areas at the same pace. Adding the right balance of both of these tasks gives the opportunity to gather more information about a bilingual child's language skills and to determine areas of need without bias. This will directly support the clinician in the identification of language impairments while considering cultural and linguistical experiences and not prioritizing the child's previous knowledge. 

         Gathering a language sample is a language-general task that represents one of the most important components of a bilingual assessment. To remain in compliance with IDEA, clinicians should consider collecting language samples in both the child’s first language and English. Even though collecting and analyzing a language sample analysis can be a time-consuming and complex task, especially if the clinician does not have sufficient knowledge of the language development or differences in the structure of the child’s language/dialect, it will provide a vast amount of information of the linguistic structures present in a child’s language skills. “When conducting language samples of Spanish–English bilingual children, clinicians must consider grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and dialectical differences in either language” (Gutiérrez-Clellen et al., 2000). With bilingual children, the language sample is used to compare all these language components in both of the child's languages. Comparing both performances will give you information about language proficiency, language transfers, language use, and to identify if there are consistent needs in both languages or if the child's language needs are due to a language difference as part of their bilingual language development. 

       Various tools are used to gather language samples between clinicians. Some of them will gather a conversational sample where they talk about a specific or non-specific topic. Also, some clinicians will have some questions or use other materials to elicit language use in their samples. One of the tools available for this section of the assessment is the School-age Language Assessment Measures (SLAM), which are a set of language elicitation cards and questions designed by Cate Crowley and Miriam Baigorri as a tool to be used in evaluating receptive and expressive language. These picture elicitation cards were created to support the bilingual evaluation while providing guidance questions and instructions to maximize the recollection of information of language use and cognitive abilities. The materials are created in both Spanish and English to facilitate the comparison of language skills in both languages and support clinical decision-making of language disorder vs. language difference.  For assistance with the analysis of language sampling, you can use a language sample analysis tool. 

        Last, dynamic assessment could also be used to conduct a language assessment in order to identify the skills that a culturally and linguistically diverse individual child possesses as well as their learning potential (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2021). This set of highly interactive and process-oriented tasks focuses on current learning rather than prior learning experiences and intents to judge a child’s ability to learn, centered on Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development (Gutiérrez-Clellen & Peña, 2001; Lidz & Peña, 1996). Integrating dynamic assessment techniques is also another possibility for these language-specific and nonspecific tasks since it includes a format of test–teach–test in which the gap between the student’s actual development and their developmental potential, also called “Zone of Proximal Development”, is reflected.  In the test–teach–test format the clinician tests a language skill.  Based on the child's performance in the first test, the clinician will teach this skill and conduct a final test to observe the child's learning potential and how the performance changed from the initial to the final skill test. 

         Some of the usual components of a dynamic assessment are cognitive assessment tasks, non-word repetitions tasks, and fast mapping tasks. dynamic assessment of narratives has supporting research evidence for its use for identifying and planning treatment for children from culturally and linguistically different backgrounds (Petersen, et al. 2017). Even though other standardized tools also assess language narratives, when it comes to assessing bilingual children, dynamic assessment provides de opportunity to gather data that is not attached or compared to language development expectations, language experiences, or the child's previous knowledge. Using dynamic assessment to evaluate bilingual students will provide information about the child's strengths considering their potential to learn a skill as a framework to identify a possible language impairment.