Assessing the progress and achievement of EAL/D learners in mainstream classrooms

by Margaret Turnbull

Chapter 1 in An EAL/D Handbook edited by Helen Harper and Susan Feez

 What is assessment?

The purpose of any assessment should be to find out what students know and can do so that teachers can tailor tasks to student needs and identify the impact of their teaching. There are many different approaches to defining assessment (Wiliam, 2011). Assessment is often categorised as formative or summative – formative occurring during the learning process to monitor progress; and summative occurring at the end of a course of study to indicate student achievement against learning objectives. 

Wiliam and Black (in Wiliam & Leahy, 2015) describe all assessment as formative ‘to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted and used by teachers, learners or peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction’. This definition is inclusive of diagnostic assessment conducted at the beginning of a teaching program to identify student learning needs. It includes in-class assessment processes that are built into daily practice and provide regular feedback to teachers and learners about their progress, and summative assessment processes used to identify longer-term impacts of teaching and learning. It may also include high-stakes statewide or national assessments, if results are received in a timely manner. 

Formative assessment that is integrated within everyday activities in the classroom can provide the most comprehensive information about students’ learning. Assessment processes can range from informal teacher observations and conversations to more formal written or spoken tests. What counts as assessment evidence is much broader in formative assessment and can include photographs, audio visual recordings, and teacher observations and notes.

In EAL/D education, formative assessment practices can provide accurate evidence of learning and meaningful feedback to support differentiated teaching and learning. Formative assessment supports EAL/D learners because it enables students to demonstrate their understandings in a familiar context as part of engaging and meaningful learning activities. It follows that teachers can develop a much deeper understanding of students’ learning successes and challenges.

Assessment and EAL/D learners

EAL/D learners reflect the increasing diversity of our student population in Australian schools. In some states and territories, EAL/D students make up almost 25% of the student population. In particular schools, the proportion may be much higher. Effective EAL/D assessment is therefore in everyone’s interest. 

While English is acknowledged as the language of our education system, standardised assessments that assume English language proficiency create a barrier for EAL/D students’
demonstration of their skills, knowledge and understandings. Unnecessarily complex language in an assessment can also prevent EAL/D students from comprehending assessment tasks or demonstrating understanding. For example, mathematics word problems written in the passive voice can make a simple mathematics operations task inaccessible for EAL/D learners. 

On the other hand, early years assessments administered to EAL/D students on entry to school often tell the teacher what they know already – that students do not have the English language to access school content. An assessment that captures EAL/D students’ literacy, numeracy and cognitive development in their home language would thus better support teachers to engage students in learning.

It is helpful to consider three areas of student knowledge when assessing EAL/D learners:

1. The level of English language proficiency in speaking, listening, reading and writing. 
2. The concepts students have in their first language relevant to the subject they are learning. For example, a student may have prior learning in Science in another language that can be translated into English. 
3. The literacy and numeracy skills students have gained in another language that may be transferable to English. For example, a student may have skills in counting-by-ones in their home language that can enhance their ongoing numeracy development in English.

Assessing English language proficiency

EAL/D learners are usually assessed on enrolment to identify their level of English language proficiency and any specific learning requirements. EAL/D students enter Australian schools with varying levels of prior education and knowledge of English. 

For EAL/D students, English language development has unique features distinct from the literacy development of English-speaking students. The home language is an important influence on the development of English as an additional language. For this reason, EAL/D learning progressions have been developed to describe the specific characteristics of EAL/D development.

Across Australia, in each state and territory, teachers use their locally developed EAL/D learning progression or the ACARA national EAL/D learning progression to:

• understand English language development for EAL/D learners
• identify where their EAL/D students are located on the progression and the nature of their speaking, listening, reading/viewing and writing skills
• monitor the linguistic progression of their EAL/D students.

By considering examples of EAL/D students’ work, including observations of their speaking and listening skills, teachers can identify linguistic elements and/or behaviours that best match those found in the EAL/D learning progression. Once students’ current level of English proficiency is identified, teachers can use the learning progression to identify the next steps in English language development and to plan appropriate support. 

Understanding a student’s level of English language proficiency provides an important context for interpreting EAL/D learner performance in assessments across the curriculum. Students who do not meet curriculum benchmarks are not necessarily ‘underperforming’, but rather they are achieving at levels commensurate with their phase of English language learning. 

Any assessment of students’ skills and knowledge needs to occur within a meaningful, familiar context (Gibbons, 2009). When you do a driving test, you want to use a familiar vehicle. If we are assessing students’ speaking, reading or writing skills then we need to give them a topic with which they are familiar so they can demonstrate their skills confidently. When assessment opportunities or tasks are implemented as part of the planned teaching sequence, then the topic and language knowledge can be frontloaded, students appropriately scaffolded and the learning intentions and criteria made explicit. 

Some considerations for assessing oral language

Oral language plays a foundational role for literacy development and so identifying EAL/D students’ spoken language skills can support the targeted teaching of reading and writing. While formal speeches are commonly used to assess spoken language, this is often an assessment of students’ formal writing skills and their ability to present it as a speech.

Oral language involves so much more and it is important to capture a range of skills including: interaction strategies, meaning negotiation, and metalanguage used to talk about and deconstruct texts. A video of students’ interaction during group work is a great way of capturing and analysing these skills. 

The TEAL website provides sample oral language assessment tasks, assessment criteria and annotated work samples for EAL/D learners. This excellent chapter from a Beverly Derewianka book published in 1992 also provides strategies and insights into oral language assessment for all students. For those wishing to upskill further, we recommend this online 2 hour PETAA course on Assessment through language.

Some considerations for assessing reading

EAL/D students may be beginning to learn to read in English at any age. Like all students, EAL/D students need to harness their knowledge of the alphabet and sounds, grammar, text structure, language features and the vocabulary of English to make meaning from texts. Unlike other students, EAL/D students are learning all these skills at once and in an unfamiliar cultural context. 

In the early years, reading assessments often focus on the constrained reading skills of phonics and phonological awareness and, in the later years, the unconstrained skills of comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. Reading assessments for EAL/D students should aim to identify both constrained and unconstrained skills, including letter–sound knowledge, decoding and comprehension skills, and vocabulary knowledge, but with the following considerations: 

Assessing decoding skills. EAL/D students may have a very different writing system and different sounds in their home language. Sometimes English sounds may be impossible to hear for particular language speakers. A useful reference for identifying letter, pronunciation and grammar differences between English and other languages is Learner English (Swan & Smith, 2001). Standardised phonics assessments usually require students to read a combination of made up and real words in isolation to assess their sound–letter knowledge. EAL/D students may not be able to distinguish between real and made-up words. They may attempt to make sense of a nonsense word and pronounce it in a way that is similar to a word they know. The real words in isolation may also be unfamiliar to EAL/D students who may not be able to predict their pronunciation. EAL/D students can thus be best assessed for their sound–letter knowledge using familiar vocabulary. 

Assessing vocabulary knowledge. Vocabulary knowledge is a critical factor for EAL/D students developing comprehension skills (Verhoeven & Droop, 1998). EAL/D students are new to learning English vocabulary and they learn mainly in the school context. They are catching up with their peers, who have been expanding their English vocabulary since birth, and continuing to learn new vocabulary through daily communication in English, at both home and school. To avoid bias, assessment should focus on the vocabulary taught in class.

Assessing comprehension. Care should be taken in identifying a text for assessing comprehension. Comprehension skills may include (amongst others): 

• scanning the text for information
• identifying the main idea
• identifying the text purpose.

If the content and vocabulary is unfamiliar, the text becomes inaccessible and students cannot demonstrate their comprehension skills. It is therefore important to develop understanding of the topic and key words in a text before using it to assess comprehension skills.

Assessing concepts and skills in home language

All children come to school with existing language skills and a variety of experiences of talk at home in meaningful contexts – often through play (Wells, 1991). These home experiences in any language build linguistic and cognitive skills that can be drawn on in learning at school. EAL/D students start school with varying levels of English language proficiency and may not be able to demonstrate their full range of skills and knowledge through standardised English-medium assessments. They may have knowledge and skills that they can demonstrate using their home language, if given the opportunity (Cummins, 2000). Assessment carried out in students’ home language can thus encourage students to demonstrate their literacy and numeracy skills in the language in which they are most confident.

Bilingual assessments can be conducted simply by translating the tasks into the home language. This is best done by a teacher who can read and write in the student’s home language. Where this is not possible, students can be given the opportunity to demonstrate understanding of concepts through drawing, gestures, actions or activities that are non-verbal. Students with the same language backgrounds can work together to complete tasks, supporting each other to discuss or write about new concepts in their home language as they transition to demonstrating understanding in English. Bilingual texts can also be used to observe students’ early reading behaviours and concepts of print as well as engagement with text. 

A teacher observing the use of home languages in well-structured class activities can gain insights into students’ skills and understandings even if she does not share the students’
home languages. 

A recent NSW Department of Education study (unpublished) of a bilingual Kindergarten assessment found that students who were not able to participate in the assessment when
administered in English, demonstrated significant reading and numeracy skills equivalent to their peers when interviewed by the Community Language Teacher (CLT) using their home language. Teachers were then able to harness this knowledge to provide an appropriate level of challenge. 

Assessing language as part of subject teaching and assessment

By integrating explicit language teaching into subject area teaching sequences, students can be assessed fairly for their use of language appropriate to the curriculum context. In planning for teaching, opportunities for assessment are designed-in as part of the lesson sequence of scaffolded activities to check on how students are progressing. In addition, end-of-unit assessments provide a learning goal which students are scaffolded to achieve through explicit language teaching. This summative assessment then provides feedback on teaching practice, student learning and the success of the unit.

How can assessments be made more accessible for EAL/D students?

Assessments often include language and content that can present barriers for students (Abedi, 2011). An assessment designed to test content knowledge should not include
language and literacy demands, or cultural content that limits the students’ ability to access or demonstrate that content. The following checklist supports the evaluation and
adaptation of content assessments for EAL/D learners. 

Table: Adapting content assessment for EAL/D learners