Teaching ESL (English as second language) requires teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders to understand the implications and procedures of productive ESL Assessment.
TESTING
Though alternative assessments help the student and teacher in the
learning in the classroom, state testing also must be taken into consideration.
Few teachers know about the organization WIDA (World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment). WIDA is a consortium of states (including Kentucky) that has developed standards, “Grounded in scientifically-based research on best
educational practices in general and English as a Second Language (ESL) and
bilingual education in particular, WIDA created and adopted its comprehensive
ELP [English Language Proficiency] standards (2004, 2007) that address the need for students to become fully proficient in both social and academic English
(WIDA, 2007, p. RG-5).
Content teachers should be familiar with the scores of students. WIDA
provides the ACCESS for ELLs® test (Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners) which is given annually and provides schools with a tool for accountability. There is also a screener test called the W-APT™. However, these tests should not be used as a basis for deciding whether or not an ESL learner should be placed in a content classroom. Students can learn in the content classroom if the correct
strategies are being used.
The complete WIDA framework describes speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills in math, science, social studies, and language arts. Technology can provide meaningful activities for ESL students. Also, technology is used for
assessment.
In the Middle and High School levels, all students who write a language other than English on the Home Language Survey must be sent to the Fayette County
Public Schools (FCPS) District Office to be given the WAPT Test, which is the placement exam for language learners. This test determines whether or not a student is an active English Language Learner (ELL) student or transition. This placement test is one that is given annually to all ELL students in the state of Kentucky. Another organization that educators rely on when teaching ESL students is TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages).
When assessing students, whether it is a high-stakes test or an informal classroom assessment, the test should be fair, reliable, valid, and
useful:
fair: refers to the assessment’s equity throughout the assessment
process.
reliability: a technical measure to determine an assessment’s ability to
produce consistent, accurate results
validity: a technical measure of an assessment’s match between the
information collected by the items and its specified purposes
useful: is an assessment’s ability to meet the needs of its users while
providing the maximum amount of reliability and validity. (TESOL, 2001, p. 6).
These terms should be well-known to the professional educator, but often are not considered when meeting the needs of the ESL learner. One of the most important terms when assessing the ESL learners is
consequential validity (Lachat, 2004). What is the use of the assessment? Lenski, Daniel, Ehlers-Zavala, and Alvayero (2004, p. 25) provide a great guide for considering consequential validity assessment:
1. Diagnosing individual student needs
2. Informing instruction
3. Evaluating programs
4. Providing accountability information
ASSESSMENT
Figure 6 is “Menu of Alternative Assessment Recommended Student with limited English Fayette County Public Schools (2006-2007).
| Personal Interview | Content Retelling | Content Dictation |
| Cloze Procedure with a word bank | Graphic Representation of work/illustrate a concept | Student self-rating and evaluation checklist
|
| Venn diagram/semantic map | Writing
sample | Journal |
| Group Testing | Technology | Audio and Video |
| Debate | Role Play | Observation/Anecdotal
record |
| Running record of performance |
Figure 6
“…abilities, proficiencies, and progress should never be based on the results of a single test” (Lachat, 2004, p. 90).
Many of these assessments can be done with
heterogeneous as well as homogeneous groups. Teachers need to design rubrics
that “carefully define criteria connected to the ESL [or content] standards,”
which will “set clear expectations for students…” (TESOL, Inc., 2001, p.118).
By doing this, students will know what is expected of them and can strive to
meet the criteria.
In order to apply instruction and assessment strategies on a consistent basis teachers and stakeholders of ESL education will need to learn what works. “…merely deciding that standard’s- based assessment should become part of a school’s educational delivery system is not sufficient for ensuring that they actually do so” (TESOL, Inc., 2001, p.4). We can learn through workshops, training sessions, virtual seminars, and conferences. We can coordinate the school schedule to allow teams to work together in order to design, implement, and assess instruction for each ESL learner. These PD’s do not have to be dreaded. Putting teachers and other students of ESL instruction in the shoes of the ESL learner is a fun way of what I call “playing school.” Learning about ESL instruction can be fun. For example a colleague, Erin Clifton, revealed how a training at here school demonstrated how difficult it is to try to find the correct word or an open response (personal communication, May 17, 2011) when there is a limited word bank to answer questions, such as ESL learners have when taking a test. Another colleague, Elizabeth Cooper, mentioned a Fayette County Public Schools technique that puts teacher’s in the perspective of ESL learners:
They have someone come in (one of our coordinators) who speaks Chinese. She comes in and begins teaching the teachers, in Chinese. Asking them to get out certain parts of the hand out and to write things down. When they don’t get it, she starts writing on the board (in Chinese). What? You guys STILL don’t
understand? She raises her voice! Still don’t get it???? She gets out pictures
and starts frantically pointing and repeating words. (personal communication,
May 19, 2011).
When designing a lesson plan, it is advanteageous to understand what is being assessed first. Once we know what we want our ESL students to understand, the main objectives of content and language learning can be written and instructional strategies designed.
Fayette Public County Schools. (2006-2007). ESL handbook: English program for speakers of other languages. Retrieved from:
http://www.fcps.net/media/33063/eslhandbook0607.pdf
Lachat, M. A. (2004).
Standards-based instruction and assessment for Englishlanguage learners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Lenski, S. D., Daniel, M., Ehlers-Zavala, F., & Alvayero, M. (2004). Assessing
struggling English-language learners.
Illinois Reading Council Journal,
32(1), 21-30.
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL). (2001).
Scenarios for ESL standards-based assessment. Alexandria, VA: Author.
