Challenges Ells Face On Standardized Assessments (1)

By Author: Adela
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English language learners face the challenge of simultaneous second-language acquisition and content-knowledge development. Are the results of ELLs' exams informing us about their content knowledge or English language ability? Are language assessments providing information about the students' past educational preparation or about their actual language proficiency? Is a wrong answer a result of unfamiliarity with the test format or trouble understanding a word in the directions? Unfamiliar sentence structures or interpretations of specific structures can cause misinterpretation, such as reflexive pronouns or relative clause structures or Breitling Replica interpretations that students' native language does not have. Consider the following sentence as an example was on the balcony. This is a preference for attaching the relative pronoun [who] to the noun phrase that appears lower in the structure. However, native speakers of Spanish, German, Dutch, French, and Russian have been shown to prefer attaching the relative pronoun [who] to the noun phrase that appears higher ...
... in the structure, in this case the mother. Such structural ambiguity is something that most assessments don't plan for, but the meaning of the sentence is different, depending on with which noun the relative pronoun is co-indexed. Challenges on assessments can also arise from unfamiliar vocabulary use. If ELLs learned English as a foreign language in their native country before their move to the United States, the variety of English taught can affect usage of particular words; for example, British, American, and Indian Englishes use words differently: the noun dress can refer to cloths for men, women, and children in Indian English; banger means sausage in British English. Within these larger language varieties are dialectal differences that can be class governed, regionally determined (e.g., bubbler means a water fountain in parts of the United States), gender specific, or based on group identity.

Background knowledge and past educational experiences also play a role in how ELLs perform on standardized assessments. For example, on a 2007 New York State Testing Program eighth-grade ELA assessment, the following question prompt appeared:

Read this sentence from the story.Like pieces of a puzzle, the pattern clicked into place. The sentence assumes that students have had experiences with jigsaw or other manipulative puzzles, which may not be the Breitling Replica Watches case for all ELLs. While for many who grew up in middle-class America, puzzles may seem to be a given part of our shared cultural knowledge; this can be an unfamiliar topic for ELLs. How many of us would be familiar with the popular children's game Chigora Danda, which is played in Zimbabwe but may have roots in India?