ASSESSING ESL STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE OF CONTENT IN K-12 CLASS

By Shanny G

The basic premise in this final topic is to provide significant information for teachers of K12 students so they may able to function successfully in school.

There are many students whose first language is not English, they aren’t typical ESL students. They come from many linguistic and cultural backgrounds and have had a wide variety of life experiences. Each student requires a different type of resources. Situations such as:

·         Born in an English country but enter school having varying degrees of exposure to the language and cultural norms. 

•       Some have immigrated with their families after having received some formal education in their home countries.

• ·         Some arrive as refugees. These students may have received little or no schooling in their home country.

• ·         Some who require ESL support also have special needs associated with mental challenges, physical challenges, behavioural difficulties, and/or giftedness (having English as a second Language) students who have a limited command of standard English and who are new require a period of adjustment.

The proper assessment in USA for more than 5 million English Language Learners (ELLs)

merits attention at all levels, for that reason  there are some common accommodations such as:

·       

  Allowing more time for test.

·        

Allowing the use bilingual dictionary.

·        

Allowing an advisor to read the test for student.

·          

 Allowing the modification of test’s questions for example that the language of the test is understood by the students.

EXAMPLES OF GOOD WARNING AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ELLs

ELLs are students who are still developing proficiency in English. They represent one in nine

students in U.S. classrooms from pre-kindergarten through grade 12, but most are concentrated in thelower grades. Collectively, they speak about 400 languages, although approximately 80 percent are nativespeakers of Spanish. Persons of Asian descent primarily speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Hmong and Korean  account for about 5 percent of the balance of the ELL population.

 While most of these students are found in large urban centers, many others live in concentrations in smaller communities. English-language learners are concentrated in six states  Arizona, California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois. The ELL students in those six states account for more than 60 percent of the ELL population.

 As principal author and Senior Research Scientist and Research Director John Young notes, 

“The U.S. federal government’s No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001 has made the need to produce valid and fair assessments for ELLs a matter of pressing national concern. So we produced a framework to assist practitioners, educators, test developers and educators in making appropriate decisions on assessment of ELLs in academic content areas.”

The No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB, includes ELLs as one of the mandated subgroups whose test scores are used to determine whether schools and school districts throughout the United States are meeting goals for what the law refers to as “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) based on state-level performance standards established for their students.