What standard does Washington State DSHS use to test its current employees and new recruits with multilingual assignments?
Given our caseload and the types of services that we provide, in addition to a legal mandate, DSHS opted to develop our own formal testing program. DSHS provides comprehensive language testing in Cambodian (Khmer), Chinese-Cantonese, Chinese-Mandarin, Korean, Lao, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Testing is available for seven different “position clusters” or job classification types (see description of position clusters in the Bilingual Employee Test Information link below). Most positions require testing of both written and oral language skills. The written test is composed of five sections: • A multiple-choice non-English language vocabulary test. • A multiple-choice non-English language reading comprehension test. • A non-English language written summarization exercise • An English to non-English language translation exercise. • A non-English to English language translation exercise. The oral test is composed of a sight translation exercise and a consecutive interpretation exercis
