Spanish Proficiency Assessment Tools
Does your organization need a way to evaluate employees or volunteers Spanish-speaking ability?
Download our Spanish Proficiency Assessment Tools (SPAT) brochure.
- Do you need to be sure that your employee is really understanding what your Spanish–speaking client or customer is saying?
- Do you need to be sure that the information that your client is receiving is spoken in a Spanish that they can understand?
- Do you want an objective way to assess the skills of your employees?
- Do you have special vocabulary that your Spanish-speaking employees need to know and use?
CHICLE has developed a set of tools to help agencies and businesses assess the Spanish language and cultural competency skills of their staff.
CHICLE developed the Spanish Proficiency Assessment Tools (SPAT) in 2006 for a wide variety of county employees, including health and social service workers, emergency responders, dental providers, and general office workers.
The tools provide an objective method to determine the types of interactions that a staff person can comfortably participate in. They are easily modifiable to suit other work situations, such as school systems, non profits, car dealers, hotel and restaurant staff, or any business or agency that serves Spanish speakers.
If your organization is large enough, we can train one or more of your employees to administer the assessment. If not, we can contract with you to do the assessments, either in person or by phone.
SPAT contains a general assessment of speaking and listening ability. If the person passes that assessment, an additional assessment related to the actual work of the employee is administered. These more advanced assessments are based on dialogues that will be developed with input from your organization
SPAT also contains an assessment of cultural competency that can be administered to any employee, as well as assessments of writing and translation skills for fluent Spanish speakers. Our 20-question assessment of Cultural Competency is mainly a series of True-False questions like: Hispanic is a racial category like Caucasian or Asian or When working with Latinos, you can assume that they are observant Catholics.