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Abstract
This article highlights key issues surrounding the assessment and accountability mandates of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for English language learners (ELLs). The policy requires high-stakes testing of ELLs in English—a language that these students, by definition, have not yet mastered. After offering background on current federal education legislation, this article shares findings from a word frequency analysis of actual statewide exams. This analysis reveals that even academic content tests are linguistically complex, using words likely unknown by an ELL, which clarifies why testing poses unique challenges for this student population. Analyses of recent ELL performance data on high-stakes tests are also provided, which document why these students and the schools serving them are disproportionately likely to be penalized in accordance with the law's requirements. The article concludes by challenging two of the more problematic assumptions at the core of NCLB mandates for ELLs.
Notes
1. Though five states currently use test translations for math, science, and/or social studies exams, the vast majority of states only test in English; and, those that use translations still require that ELLs pass an English language arts exam (CitationSullivan et al., 2005).
2. This will vary according to how many English words an ELL knows; for instance, if an ELL only knows the 1,000 most frequent words in English, then this means that 98% of a text must use those words to be comprehensible (CitationNation, 2006).
3. Nation's list of word families comes from the British National Corpus, but because the analysis uses word families, it is possible to analyze texts written in Standard American English (CitationNation, 2006). For the purposes of this research, CitationNation's (2006) RANGE software was used to analyze word frequency.
4. It is worth noting that the overall graduation rate includes ELLs. Therefore, the graduation rate for native English speakers is likely to be higher than 69% because ELLs, when included, pull rates downward.