Identification of English Learners

Identification of English Learners

Identification of English Learners

Duran is especially concerned about identification of English-language learners. He has found that the typical practice is to classify students as English-language learners if their proficiency in English is limited for the purposes of classroom learning. However, some states use a test to make the classification while others use the numbers of years of exposure to instruction in an English-speaking environment or other factors. Duran believes that determination of English-language learner status should be based on measured proficiency in English. He has found that it is not often done this way, in part because there are few tests of English proficiency and considerable disagreement about the quality of existing tests.

This stems from the fact that there is no single theory on how to measure language proficiency. Tests vary across states as do the regulations about the number of years students are required to be in school before they must receive instruction only in English (e.g., in California the requirement is one year, but this varies across states). The result of these inconsistencies is that the categories (i.e., English-language learner and students with disabilities) consist of heterogeneous populations. Some workshop participants thought that this problem could be overcome for students with disabilities by further refining the categories for reporting purposes, that is, categorizing by the nature of the disability or the type of accommodation provided.

However, this would result in even smaller numbers of students in each category, and it would not resolve the problem of heterogeneous categories for English-language learners. These problems become more immediate with the newly implemented accountability measures that require disaggregated reporting of results for English-language learners and students with disabilities. For this part, learning a foreign language needs a leaning tools, many students choose Rosetta Stone English and Rosetta Stone French to learn English and French. As stated earlier, one objective for the workshop was to hear firsthand accounts about states' policies and experiences with providing accommodations and reporting results for accommodated test takers. This chapter summarizes the presentations made by Phyllis Stolp, director of development and administration for Texas, and Scott Trimble, director of assessment for Kentucky. Stolp's discussion provides an overview of Texas' state-wide assessments and accommodation and reporting policies. Trimble provided similar information about Kentucky's assessment programs and policies and also presented some of the assessment results. He focused on comparisons of performance for the general population and students with disabilities who used accommodations and those who did not. As for the comparisons of performance, other experts should consider and think if they should take such measures to do the same thing. Simultaneously they need to try to discover other kinds of methods which really help people deal with these problems on the whole.

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