Assessing Multilingual Learners (MLs) accurately can be a complex task for any teacher. Most educational assessments do not reveal an accurate level of academic achievement of MLs due to non-academic factors (Abedi & Faltis, 2015). Language, cultural, and prior knowledge difference often cause MLs not to be able to show what the students know and are able to do in ways that teachers can understand. Even when MLs communicate well about social issues, they may not have strong academic language development (Cummins, 2001). MLs may not understand the formal language of tests well (Abedi & Faltis, 2015). For example, the students may be confused by critical functions words such as but or except. These words may seem insignificant, but they change the meaning of a sentence. Students may also be confused by a concentration of many new vocabulary words used together. MLs typically perform better on assessments that allow them to show what they know in their own form of English, rather than confine them to the formal English of a teacher or publisher created test.
Finally, prior knowledge and cultural differences can cause MLs not to perform well on traditional tests (Lane & Leventhal, 2015). Most tests reflect a White, middle class native English-speaking background. MLs bring rich cultural and experiential backgrounds to engagements with assessment. However, this background may not be reflected in the assessment items. (Heubert & Hauser, 1999).
Focus on What MLs CAN Do
WIDA Standards are the Indiana standards for content area and English as a New Language (ENL) teachers. They provide support for teachers to modify and adapt instruction and assessment for MLs based on language proficiency levels. The expectations from the WIDA standards are that teachers will integrate content and language instruction. WIDA standards are a break from more traditional standards that prescribe the scope of what students should learn at each language proficiency level, to placing more responsibility on teachers to decide which aspects of language acquisition are best for the developmental level of the student and the content area context of the lesson. The emphasis in the WIDA standards is on what students can do at each language proficiency level. For a lesson, teachers write how students can show what know and can do based on their level of language acquisition. While this philosophy is helpful for ML success in school, teachers should also consider how to scaffold students in their next language developmental steps to support their language acquisition. So, if a level 2 student is performing well with level 2 language tasks and academic support, then the teacher should start pushing the student toward level 3 objectives and tasks.
Suggestions for Supporting MLs
WIDA emphasizes supporting language comprehension and acquisition through multiple levels of language: The discourse level, the sentence level, and the word level. At the discourse level, the teacher should consider the linguistic complexity of the text that is read or produced by the students in terms of the amount of language, the language structures, the density of the language, the organization of the language, and the sentence types used. At the sentence level, the teachers should consider how to adapt language forms and conventions to support students. They should consider how to adapt grammatical structures and language conventions. At the word and phrase level, WIDA suggests adapting the vocabulary and word choices. However, I would caution teachers that MLs need to work with grade level academic vocabulary. Instead of changing word choice, teachers should find ways to provide comprehensible input to support student understanding of high level vocabulary.
So what are some examples of what ML students can do?
All ML students can
Understand and use grade level academic vocabulary (often with comprehensible input support)
Engage in higher order thinking (WIDA often lowers expectations for cognitive engagement in the examples that they provide in their training materials)
Use images to support their comprehension and express their ideas
Show what they know through graphic organizers, diagrams, charts, bullet lists, mind mapping, demonstrations
Use word banks (with images), sentence starters, paragraph frames
Understand text modified to their language proficiency levels
Accommodating Language in Content Area Assessments
Language can interfere with accurate assessment of content area knowledge and skills. When teachers construct assessment items for ML students, they need to attend to second language challenges. Teachers should consider the following areas for modifying the language of an assessment:
Shorten sentence length
Change from passive to active voice
Eliminate long noun phrases
Eliminate long question phrases
Provide support when using comparative structures (Venn diagrams, for example)
Reduce or eliminate prepositional phrases
Simplify sentence and discourse structures
Reduce or eliminate relative and subordinate clauses
Avoid words like not, all but, yet
These adaptations may not be useful or desirable in language assessments if the teacher is assessing the previously listed language aspects (Hoover & Mendez Barletta, 2016).
