ENDR 559 Assessing ELL's in today's diverse classrooms requires teachers to look at assessment through the lens of students

acquiring a second language (L2). Discuss some important factors to consider while assessing ELL's in your classroom. One important factor to consider when assessing ELLs is their educational experiences outside and in the United States. If students have only experienced schooling in an another country prior to arriving in your classroom, they will most likely be used to a different kind of classroom culture. For example, they may be used to calling their teachers Teacher instead of using their names. Additionally, their other schools may have had different educational priorities; different countries may place more emphasis on one language domain than the others. The culture shock that many ELLs experience upon arriving in the United States may often be compounded by differences in the classroom environment and teaching styles. The text mentions that social writing is a great way to get more background information about your students. I think this would be an especially appropriate assessment activity for students whose prior educational experiences were in a different country. Depending on the prompt, students may be willing to share a bit of information with you about what they did in their previous classroom(s). Similarly, another important factor to consider is the continuity of students' educational experiences. For example, in the district where I am student teaching, we have close to 300 reported migrant students. Sometimes these students leave for weeks at a time, which puts them a great disadvantage when they eventually return. For these students, it is especially important to regularly incorporate classroom assessment measures. This means that if they are not present at the time of large scale assessment measures, the school still has a record of their progress, albeit one that is not standardized. Furthermore, if the student does return, you have records with which you can help the student pick up where s/he left off or recover lost ground. Discuss how your classroom assessments inform the teaching and instruction decisions you make for oral language and literacy development of your ELL's. In what ways do you closely monitor the progress of your ELL students? In the Spanish Language Arts class that I am teaching, students take notes for each chapter of our class novel. Additionally, at the end of each chapter, we answer essential questions that blend reading comprehension and life experiences. When students have finished taking notes and responding to the essential questions, I collect their notebooks, read through them, and provide written feedback that they can use to improve future writing. If I notice that several kids are making the same mistakes, I address those concepts in front of the whole class, providing anonymous examples and non-examples and leading students in a brainstorm of how we can fix those mistakes. In terms of oral language, I assess students through whole class discussions and Think Pair Share/small group activities. I keep a record of student progress by noting frequency of participation and taking anecdotal notes. Additionally, I often have students do small group projects in class and present their work to the rest of the class. When we start the project, I give each student a rubric for the project and for the presentation. We go over it as a class so that every student knows how their written work and oral presentation will be assessed.