How We Know What the Students Know
Grading and Testing
While we teachers are most concerned with student learning, some of those outside the classroom are more concerned with that graphic manifestation of learning, the grade. If many of your students fail, you might find yourself in the principal’s office more often than your worst behaved student. Parents who have never been to a PTA meeting or responded to a request to meet with you in your classroom will likely visit you for the first time when their children’s grades drop below 70%. Sadly, you may be judged more by the grades you give than by the knowledge you impart. Whether you keep your job may depend more on how you grade than on how you teach.
GRADING IN MIXED-ABILITY CLASSROOMS
Because of the incredible range of backgrounds of students found in most ESL classes, it may be impossible to measure all students by the same standard. If a teacher sets a standard for written language that teen-age students who have attended only three years of school in their native countries can meet, the students who read and write their native language well will not be challenged. If the standard is appropriate for the latter group, the former students will likely all fail.
Grading systems that assume that all students can fit into a 30-point range are fine for homogeneous groups. When, however, you have readers mixed with nonreaders, students who perform well below grade level mixed with those who perform well above, and students with requisite knowledge mixed with those who lack it, it is impossible to create a single standard appropriate for all. Less than most groups, students in the typical ESL class will not fit into the 70- to 100% range.
INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION PLANS
If your classes are small, one possibility is to work from individual education programs (IEPs), as do special education teachers. With IEPs you can tailor the curriculum for students who have not attended much school. Such students can work with the main group when working on oral language, and work individually with you or an assistant when working on written material. Students who are identified as special education students will have IEPs (see Chapter 14) and you will have assistance in teaching them from the special education department.
If your classes are large and you have no assistants, the IEP option is not viable (except for special education students). Any special education teacher will tell you that simply creating and maintaining IEPs is time consuming, and much of the time consumed will be taken away from instruction. In addition, those teachers with large classes and no helpers will be able to give little individual attention to students working on individual curricula, thus defeating the purpose of the IEP in the first place. When 20 IEP students are working with one teacher, the teacher can do little more than hand everyone a different worksheet and hope for the best.
The worst option is to lower the standard to the point that everyone, even the students who have attended little school, can earn a 70 on daily work and tests. This option is exercised more than educators care to admit. If you teach to the least common denominator, you will not get any negative feedback for giving low grades, but your students will not learn as much as they should. Again, the range of ability, background, and motivation in your class will probably be vast. If you teach your class well, chances are that by Halloween your most successful students will already know more English than your least successful students will know at the end of the school year. It will not do to cheat one end of the bell curve in order to justify passing grades for the other.
MULTITRACK GRADING: SAME CLASS, DIFFERENT GOALS
One option for such situations is to grade on at least two tracks. You can call one a college-prep or pre-international commerce track and the other a general track. If you have nonreaders, you can have a separate track that includes basic literacy skills. In such a system, students in the top track would be graded strictly by the book with an emphasis on mastery of academic material. Those who cannot yet read any language would not have spelling grades included. Those who can read and write somewhat but are otherwise weak academically could be given extra credit for mastery of nonacademic, basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS). Such students will likely be in ESL longer than their better-prepared peers.
Even if you have some nonreaders, the class can still do many oral language activities together. If you have an assistant, volunteer help, computers, or language laboratory equipment, you will have the means to work on separate tracks. If not, do the best you can, but fight as hard as you can to get the equipment you need. If you are teaching students with third-grade skills alongside those with tenth-grade skills, you deserve the appropriate tools.
Even if you are not able to track within your class, all is not lost. Another option is to grade by the book, academics only, until grades drop below a certain point, let’s say 85. Tell the students and their parents that grades above 85 reflect the demands of the academic track. When scores drop below 85, allow extra credit for nonacademic performance, or weigh oral language more heavily than written in grading those with weak writing skills.
Yet another option is to grade by skills mastered. You could determine that for the vocabulary part of the grade, the mastery of 200 vocabulary words in a six-week grading period merits a 70, and each 10 words or so beyond that minimum merit an extra point, up to the maximum of 100 points.
NO, YOU AREN’T CHEATING: WHAT COUNTS FOR GENERAL LEARNERS AND COLLEGE-PREP LEARNERS
It will not be dishonest of you to grade on a multitrack system. Again, unless you are one of the few ESL teachers working with homogeneous groups, you will be teaching different levels within your class. It is not unreasonable that you grade accordingly, as long as everyone understands what the grades mean.
Multitrack grading will not cause as much concern in an ESL class as it might in a college-prep class. One of the perks of teaching ESL is that students and their parents want mastery of the subject, and you can convince most of them that mastery matters more than the grades. While students in a college-prep class might be fighting for every fraction of a grade point they can get, your students and their parents know that an academic future in the United States begins with mastery of English, and everything else is of lesser significance. If a parent wants to know why her bright, hard-working son scored a 75 while the neighbor’s child, who cannot yet read, scored a 78, explain that the former is being graded as a student who is expected to enter an all-English college-prep track within two or three years, while the neighbor’s child is being graded on progress toward functional literacy and will probably remain in ESL for a longer period of time. Same class, different goals, and hence different standards.
TESTING, TESTING
Your students are going to get more than their share of testing. They will be tested before they enter your program and they will be tested at least once per year to determine if they are ready to exit from or change placement within the program. Depending on your state and the number of years they have studied in the United States, they may also take a standardized state test, and they will have the tests you give them.
You will give tests for two reasons. One, of course, is to determine what your students know. There is an expression in Spanish, En el ojo del amo, engorda el gallo, or the rooster seems to fatten in the eye of its owner. When we are involved in instruction, it can be easy to delude ourselves into believing that our students have progressed farther than they really have. If this causes us to allow our students to bypass essential skills, our students lose. Testing keeps our feet on the ground. Testing also lets the students and their parents know how much progress has been made.
Keeping Noses to the Grindstone
Tests are useful to keep students motivated. Most of us who attended college in the 1960s and 1970s took a class or two taught by forward thinking professors who allowed us to grade ourselves. A few of our peers loved learning so much that they studied what they should have, but most of us took advantage of our professors’ kindness and took it easy, so self-grading classes went the way of the dinosaur. Whether we like it or not, testing is a way to keep our students on their toes.
When testing vocabulary, translation is fast and efficient. You can dictate the word, use it in a sentence, and have the students write both the word in English and its meaning in their native language. This method does have certain disadvantages. Some would argue that any translation activity, at least for beginners, deters learners from thinking in English. This can sometimes be the case when too much translation and too little authentic language use goes on. If, however, students hear and use the vocabulary words many times in classroom activities, translating on test day will not do them any harm. If, however, your students speak a variety of languages or you cannot read your students’ home language, this option is not viable.
When testing concrete vocabulary, you can test with pictures. You can provide answer sheets on which three drawings are offered as answer choices for each item. After you say a word or a sentence, have the students mark the correct picture. Or you can provide a copy of a photo or a drawing that includes a number of items and activities with answer blanks or identifying numbers or letters next to them. As you dictate words in English, your students can write them in the appropriate blanks.
You can also test vocabulary with multiple choice or true-or-false questions. You can ask beginning students if a cat is an animal, if your blouse is blue, if you are touching your nose, or if it is raining outside. Or you can ask, “Which of the following is a person? A. a cat; B. a boy; C. a house; or
D. a car,” or “Which item is cold? A. fire; B. the sun; C. an ice cube; D. a stove.”
Some computer programs test vocabulary for you. Programs like The Rosetta Stone allow students to hear words and sentences and then ask them to click on a picture. Networked versions of some of these programs automatically log test results.
Testing Spelling
You can kill two birds with one stone by testing spelling and vocabulary together. If you provide quite a bit of exposure to vocabulary, you should find that most of your students can learn to recognize a lot of words each week. In my experience, most students can learn to at least understand 100 words per week if they have had ample exposure and opportunity to practice them. You will probably find that many of your students have a more difficult time spelling them all. You might want to designate some words as both spelling and vocabulary words and others as vocabulary words only. You can offer extra credit to those students who go the extra mile and learn to spell all the words that are on the vocabulary only list.
The weekly spelling test is a good way to motivate your students to study their words. Spelling, however, is more than writing words in isolation. Grade spelling in dictation and authentic writing as well, but do not hold students responsible for spelling words that they have not yet studied.
Testing Speaking and Listening
Again, language consists of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Because it is easiest to test reading and writing, sometimes listening and speaking skills are poorly monitored. Listening skills for beginners can be monitored with tests in which students hear a word, phrase, or sentence and respond by marking a picture or written word on a test sheet. Or you can give oral true-or-false tests or oral multiple choice tests in which you provide single-word answer choices. When students become more advanced, you can sometimes give tests in which you ask the question orally but require students to answer with complete written sentences.
Teachers can test speaking skills through controlled conversation, in which they ask select questions and note when the students can answer with the correct vocabulary and structure. Also useful are oral essay tests in which students respond to a question and the teacher notes which structures are attempted and which are used correctly. Or the teacher can keep a checklist for each student and note when skills are mastered based on observations of regular language use in the classroom.
Testing Grammar
If an examination does not test that which contributes to communication, it has little value. I could teach beginning English learners that the present participle ends in the suffix ing and then tell them to seek and identify such words in a test. Most students would then pass the test, erring only with a few confusing words like thing and earring. Or I could teach beginning Spanish learners that most words that end in iera or ara without an accent mark are verbs in the past subjunctive and then present a list of verbs and ask students to choose verbs in that tense. Those who learned my simple rule could answer my questions correctly, but that knowledge would have no value. For students who do not understand the past subjunctive or know how to apply it to produce useful sentences, such knowledge is useless trivia.
The best grammar tests are those that tell you if your students can apply the rules. Cloze tests like the one below work well for this purpose. Provide a sentence that is missing a key word, as in the following sentences.
Where ____ your sister live? She ____ in Dallas.
____ you French? No, I _____ not. I am German.
_____ it rain tomorrow? No, I ____ think so.
Substitution activities also can be used to test active grammar skills. You can provide a paragraph like the following:
Tomorrow our class will go on a field trip. We will come to school at eight o’clock like we usually do. At nine o’clock we will get on a bus and go to a museum. We will eat a sack lunch at a picnic area behind the museum, and then we will go to a nearby art gallery. We will see paintings by some well-known local artists. At two o’clock, our teacher will take us back to the bus, and then we will come back to school. We will write an essay about our trip.
Have the students substitute the word yesterday for tomorrow, and then make all other appropriate changes in the passage. You can also provide passages with a singular subject, substitute a plural one, and have students make appropriate changes, or you can insert don’t or not and require the students to change all verbs in the passage from affirmative to negative.
You can also test your students’ active knowledge of grammar with questions that require them to answer in complete, grammatical sentences. Where is your book? It is in my desk. Where did you live last year? I lived in Bolivia. What would you do if you heard the fire alarm? I would leave the building.
SELF ASSESSMENT: GIVING STUDENTS THEIR OWN CHECKLISTS
It is important for students to monitor their own progress because it is impossible for us to peer inside our students’ heads and see all that is going on there. You can create a checklist of language milestones and have your students note the date when each is met. The list can include but should not be limited to the following:
I understood a greeting.
I greeted someone in English and was understood.
I can name ten colors.
I can name ten articles of clothing.
I successfully ordered an item in a store or a restaurant.
I asked directions and understood the answer.
I gave directions.
I can sing an English song [name the song].
I understood an English song [name the song].
I told a joke in English and was understood.
I understood an English joke.
I had a conversation with an English speaker.
I understood part of the television news.
I understood part of the teacher’s lecture in ______ class.
I understood most of the teacher’s lecture in ______ class.
I can make statements in the present tense.
I can ask questions in the past tense.
I can tell about imaginary situations using would.
I watched an English-language movie and was able to follow the plot.
When all items on the list are checked, provide a new list with more demanding skills. When a student is feeling frustrated, produce the list and say, “Look how far you’ve come. Last January you couldn’t even _______ and now you can ______, ______, and______. ” If a student tells a white lie on the self-assessment, use the lie as a motivational tool. “It says here that you can ask questions in the past tense, so why did you ask me, ‘Where you go yesterday?’” At this point, a quick review of the use of the auxiliary verb did will likely be well received.
PREPARING STUDENTS FOR STANDARDIZED TESTS (PLEASE DON’T)
The trend toward including English learners in state assessments will result in better language learning even though, given the difficulty of learning a new language, it is not reasonable to expect them to perform on the same level as native speakers until they have had years of English study. It is, however, a great relief to no longer hear, “Who cares? They don’t take the state test anyway.” One negative side effect of this inclusion, however, is the tendency to teach to standardized tests, sometimes from the very beginning. It is essential that we do not put the cart before the horse. It is good to be able to use a semicolon correctly, but this is not a priority for someone who cannot yet orally produce a grammatical sentence.
Some teachers and administrators attempt to speed up their students’ progress on paper by bypassing oral language and jumping right to the skills that are to be tested on written standardized tests. This never works. After students develop good listening skills, all contact with oral English becomes an English lesson. They learn new words in context, and grammatical structures are reinforced. Those who bypass this process miss out on a lot of language. Even if a narrow focus on items to be tested helps ratchet up test scores a few points in the short term, in the long term all academic indicators, including test scores, will suffer. It is unwise to attempt to teach language in a vacuum.
Working With Younger Students
Many young children learn oral language quickly and have fun doing it. It is part of your job to test and give grades, but be careful to not let the grading process crush a child’s enthusiasm for language learning. The oral tests with picture answers are especially appropriate for young children who are learning oral English.
When making placement decisions for young children based on tests, keep in mind that sometimes test scores are more indications of what a child wants to tell you than of what the child really knows. When making such decisions for young children, it is important to also include information gleaned from observation.