Assessment accommodations for emergent bilinguals in mainstream classroom assessments: a targeted literature review

ABSTRACT

Despite the importance of assessment accommodations, little is known about its use in the context of classroom assessments. To provide guidance for teachers on how to best support their emergent bilinguals during classroom assessments, there may be ideas from large-scale assessments that can be used in the classrooms. This article, a targeted literature review, examines themes and evidence relative to assessment accommodations for emergent bilinguals in mainstream classrooms. Based on the purpose of this paper, there are five essential themes in the finding section: 1) linguistic complexity in content-area assessments; 2) definition of assessment accommodation; 3) selection and implementation of assessment accommodations in mainstream classrooms; 4) effectiveness of specific assessment accommodations, and 5) challenges of translating large-scale assessment accommodations to classroom use. Findings suggest the importance of explicitly teaching assessment accommodations and designing assessment languages to maximum accessibility for all students. This article also has implications for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment accommodation
• emergent bilinguals
• large scale assessment
• classroom assessment
• literature review

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the valuable support from her guidance committee, especially Dr. Amelia Gotwals. All errors in this paper are the author’s responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Emergent bilinguals, also known as English language learners (ELLs) or English learners (ELs) in the US school system, are students “who speak a language other than English and are acquiring English in school” (García, Kleifgen, & Falchi, 2008, p. 7). In this study, considering that the term of emergent bilinguals is the most updated way of speaking about it, I chose to use emergent bilinguals although the majority of the studies involved in this paper used ELLs or, ELs or language minority.