Why Would A Person Like One Of These Better Than The Other?

By Author: Adela
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Another example of a question that may determine more about an ELLs prior experiences than his or her actual knowledge comes from the 2005 New York State Assessment sampler for ESL students. There is a picture showing students in a school band and students in a school industrial arts Cartier Replica Watches classroom. The prompt is as follows:

Look at the pictures below. There are different activities you can do at school. Look at the pictures. How are they the same? How are they different? Why would a person like one of these better than the other? Give as many reasons as you can. Write about the pictures on page 15 of your booklet.

The assumptions implicit in this question are that these students go to a school that offers these activities and the ELL has or has had access to these activities. This is more a question of students' past experiences with particular school-based practices than an accurate assessment of English proficiency; a student with less experience with the pictured activities will be graded lower than a student ...
... who has more experience with such activities. Yet these students may have the same language ability.

Standardized assessments are not the only type of assessment that can conflate issues of language proficiency and content knowledge. Traditional classroom assessments may pose many of the same challenges discussed above: they are highly language dependant in ways that may exceed the current proficiency level of the students; they may give an assessment of language proficiency rather than content knowledge; and they may provide cultural connections and contexts that ELLs are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with.

These issues make standardized assessment of ELLs a challenge and the information provided by these assessments unreliable. However, as educators, we do need to know how students are doing, what gains they are making, where gaps in their understanding exist, and what types of instructional Cartier Replica strategies and topics need to be introduced to facilitate learning. Assessing ELLs in mainstream English classrooms can be a challenge, but there are ways that English teachers can move toward a more accurate way of learning about their ELLs.