Home Language Survey, TELPAS, and ELPS: How Texas Identifies and Supports Emergent Bilingual Students

Every Texas educator who works with multilingual learners meets three acronyms early and often: the Home Language Survey (HLS), TELPAS, and the ELPS. Together they describe the journey of an emergent bilingual student in Texas: how the student is identified, how their English proficiency is assessed each year, and which standards guide the language support they receive in every classroom. This guide explains each piece and how they fit together.

A note on terminology. Since Senate Bill 2066 (2021), the Texas Education Code uses emergent bilingual (EB) student in place of the older terms “English learner” and “limited English proficient.” The change is more than cosmetic: it names what these students bring (an emerging bilingualism) rather than what they lack. We use it throughout this guide.

The Home Language Survey (HLS)

Identification begins at enrollment. Every student enrolling in a Texas public school for the first time receives a Home Language Survey, completed by the parent or guardian (or by the student in the upper grades). Since August 2023, districts must use the standardized survey form produced by the Texas Education Agency, available in English and Spanish; districts can no longer write their own versions.

The standardized survey asks about:

What language or languages are used in the child’s home most of the time,
What language or languages the child uses most of the time,
And, if the child had a previous home setting, what language or languages were used there.

If any response indicates a language other than English, the school assesses the student’s English proficiency to determine whether the student qualifies as emergent bilingual and what support is appropriate. Parents always retain rights in this process: the survey results and any program placement are reviewed with parental notice, and placement in a bilingual or ESL program requires parent approval.

The LPAC: who decides

The decisions along this journey belong to the campus Language Proficiency Assessment Committee (LPAC), which includes a professional bilingual educator or ESL educator and a parent representative. The LPAC must complete identification and program placement within the student’s first four weeks of enrollment. It then reviews each emergent bilingual student’s progress at least annually, recommends linguistic accommodations for instruction and state testing, and eventually determines when a student meets the state criteria for reclassification as English proficient.

TELPAS: the annual proficiency assessment

The Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS) measures where each emergent bilingual student is on the path to English proficiency. It is administered every spring to identified students in kindergarten through grade 12, and it assesses the four language domains: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Kindergarten and grade 1: teachers rate all four domains holistically, based on ongoing classroom observations and student interactions.
Grades 2 through 12: students take online assessments combined with teacher-rated components across the four domains.

Results place each student at one of four proficiency levels: beginning, intermediate, advanced, or advanced high. These levels are not grades; they describe how much linguistic support a student needs to engage with grade-level academic content. TELPAS results feed the LPAC’s decisions about instruction, accommodations, and reclassification, always alongside other measures such as classroom performance and teacher judgment. Reclassification itself follows state criteria set by TEA; no single test score decides it.

ELPS: the standards behind the support

The English Language Proficiency Standards (ELPS), now in 19 TAC Chapter 120, Subchapter B, are the instructional backbone of this whole system. They define what schools must do for emergent bilingual students in every subject, not just in language arts: every teacher of an emergent bilingual student is responsible for supporting language development alongside content.

The ELPS include cross-curricular student expectations for learning strategies, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, plus proficiency level descriptors for five levels: Pre-Production, Beginning, Intermediate, High Intermediate and Advanced. In practice, the ELPS are what a Texas teacher uses to plan linguistic accommodations: the intentional supports (visuals, sentence stems, pre-taught vocabulary, adapted texts) that make grade-level content comprehensible at each proficiency level.

The new ELPS are in effect. The updated ELPS, adopted by the State Board of Education in September 2024, are in classrooms beginning with the 2026-27 school year. TELPAS keeps its current four levels during the 2026-27 and 2027-28 transition years, and a new aligned TELPAS follows in 2028-29. Always confirm current requirements with TEA and your district.

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Official sources: TELPAS at the Texas Education Agency and the ELPS at txel.org. This page was reviewed and updated in July 2026; always confirm current requirements with TEA and your district, as state rules evolve.