Accuracy of teachers’ predictions of language minority and majority students’ language comprehension

Abstract

The classroom is an important context of second language learning for language minority children. Teachers are responsible for creating good learning opportunities by securing language use well adjusted to the children's level of comprehension. Thus, teachers should have realistic expectations of this. The purpose of the research is to increase knowledge of the classroom as a language learning setting by exploring the accuracy of teachers’ evaluations of their students’ language comprehension and possible biases in their evaluations of language minority compared to majority students. A total of 205 students from 13 different classes and their main teachers from five different schools in Norway participated in the research. The students were tested for vocabulary and grammatical comprehension of Norwegian, and their teachers were asked to predict how each child would score on each test item. The language minority children gained lower scores than the majority children, a difference also predicted by their teachers. The accuracy of teachers’ predictions was higher for language majority than minority children, however. This difference seems to be directly affected by the language minority/majority status of the child. The teachers were, furthermore, most accurate when predicting the comprehension scores of the students they believed to be high performers.

Keywords:

• language comprehension; language minority students; second language acquisition; teacher expectation; teacher bias

Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded by the Norwegian Board of Education. The author thanks the teachers and students for their participation. Thanks also go to the following persons for their important contributions to these studies: Lena Løseth, Jamie Norum and Monica Rønning for their help in testing children and collaborating with teachers in gathering their data; Anne-Marie Halberg for invaluable help in analysing the data and preparing the tables; and anonymous referees for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

¹In addition, a group of children from trans-national marriages and with mixed language backgrounds were included in Study 2.

²Sami children and children with sign language as their mother tongues have specific language rights, however.

³Due to the fact that these two majority children from Class A were to move to another school, they were tested ahead of their classmates. Their teacher, however, did not evaluate the students until about six months later. The accuracy of the teacher's predictions of the two children fell within the mean ±1 SD for the majority students in Study 1.

⁴Sierra Leone in Table 6 indicates the country of one of the parents’ origin and not a parental language.

⁵Based on information from 125 out of 162 teachers.