Elizabeth D. Peña

Elizabeth Dora Peña is a certified speech-language pathologist and Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). She is widely known for her work on bilingualism, language disorders in children, and the development of assessment tools for linguistically diverse populations. Peña holds the position of Professor in the University of California, Irvine School of Education, where she previously served as the Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity.

Education Peña earned her B.A. in Communicative Disorders and Spanish from the University of Redlands in May 1982. She continued her education at San Francisco State University, where she received her M.S. in Communicative Disorders in May 1984. ln 1993, she completed her Ph.D. in Speech-Language-Hearing at Temple University. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Dynamic Assessment: A Non-Biased Approach for Assessing the Language of Young Children, was supervised by Aquiles Iglesias.

Career Peña's career started with a clinical work experience. Peña worked as a bilingual speech-language pathologist at Children's Hospital Oakland (1985-1988) and the San Francisco Head Start program (1984-1986).

In 2017, Peña became a Professor in the University of California, Irvine School of Education. She then became the Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity in 2019 In addition to the Department of Education's grant, the UCI School of Education and UCI Graduate Division contributed an additional $1.25 million to support the program's development. The focus of this five-year project is to create an English morphosyntax test that will help diagnose developmental language disorder in bilingual children who have Spanish or Vietnamese as their primary language.

Research Peña's work focuses on bilingualism, language impairment, and the development of culturally appropriate assessment tools for children from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Dynamic Assessment and Intervention is a critical study led by Peña focused on dynamic assessment, a non-biased approach to evaluating language abilities in bilingual children. Instead of relying solely on static test scores, this method assesses a child's learning potential through interactive and scaffolded testing. Peña's work provides a more accurate way to differentiate language impairments from language differences, particularly for children from diverse backgrounds. Her research has focused on creating assessments that accurately measure semantic skills in children.

Peña started the development of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) in 1998. Conducted through Moody College's Human Abilities in Bilingual Language Acquisition Lab, the research was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Representative publications