Assess ESL students informally
Assessment is an important part of teaching. That said, how to assess ESL students? Often, we work with multiple levels, needs and age groups of ESL students. In our state, we have a big state assessment once a year but the results come back at the end of the school year, by which time they are no longer accurate. What’s an ESL teacher to do?
A while back I wrote a post about fun assessment activities for ESL students. But we cannot always do fun, and sometimes need to mix things up a bit. This is where informal assessment comes in. One that allows us to see real-time progress of our English learners. How? You create your own assessments, scour the internet for ready-made ones or adapt those shared by colleagues. In this blog post, I’d like to share a couple of ways to track student progress that will hopefully allow them to buy into their own learning.
Assess beginner ESL students
When we have a beginner student, we are constantly assessing/monitoring their progress. It can be as simple as asking them to show thumbs up or thumbs down or to repeat sounds, new words, and phrases. It helps us see how effective we are in our instruction and determine what information has stuck.
At the same time, it is interesting to see that when you ask them to work independently to show what they know, the situation changes. What you think they were comfortable with, turns out the very thing you need to keep continuing to work on.
Here is what’s happening
As with everything else, assessing beginner ESL students can be a daunting task. They are at a stage in their language learning where they do not feel comfortable naturally producing sounds in English and tend to giggle a lot because they think they sound funny (especially the older students). They are also at a stage where they are able to repeat well but independent work brings them even more self-doubt than they expected. The brain does not always readily keep the information and they need constant repetition, which, let’s be honest after a few times begins to become burdensome to them.
Finally, when the students are immersed in an English speaking school, they are surrounded by English all day long. Their ESL class could be one or two periods a day at most, i.e. a class where they hopefully understand at least partly what is going on. I’ve had students tell me that they look forward to my class just because they can relax a little and feel like they are capable of doing the work.
Here is what you can do
While it is important for me as the teacher to assess my students so that I can continue planning my lessons, it is just important for the students themselves to have a sense of achievement. The kind that lasts longer because it is intrinsic and not brought on by, say, a gade. After all, the first few weeks or months in a new school that communicates in an entirely different language, can be super overwhelming. The initial excitement is quite soon followed by a more extended period of uncertainty, self-doubt, and frustration.
In order to make sure that the students stay motivated, I created a self- assessment sheet, which they all can fill out once a week (I do it on Fridays) to see their own progress. Here is an example of one.
The self-assessment sheet consists of simple questions and statements that require the students to rate themselves on a scale from one to ten, where 1 means not at all and 10 means completely. For example, “I understood what people said to me in English” could get a rating of 1 for the first couple of weeks. However, if the assessment is given consistently, both the teacher and the student will start seeing progress soon.
I have my students fill it out independently and then we sit down for a short conference. I look through their answers and ask them questions like “are you sure you did not understand anything? You were able to respond to my questions in class/you were able to pick out five new words in your history class that you wanted to learn, etc.” The students then begin to see that they, in fact, are making progress. Remember, the overwhelm that they may be experiencing clouds the actual progress and the self-assessment sheet helps them see that they are moving along.
Assess intermediate ESL students
Since I have a mixed level classroom, I also use a different form of assessment for my higher-level students (intermediate and up). Many regular classroom teachers use the exit ticket strategy, where at the end of each lesson, they ask the students to answer an open-ended question or statement such as “today I learned….” or “one thing that was new to me was…” or “I still have a question about….”
After talking with my mainstream colleagues we realized that just the conversation between us is not enough (you can read more on collaboration between ESL and mainstream teachers here). I see what our students are doing in my classroom, then talk to the mainstream teacher with suggestions and things seem to go well for a while. Until the students have to take a test, say, in science, and it turns out that they did not understand a concept.
Therefore, after a little bit of thinking, I decided that using an exit-ticket strategy would benefit those English learners who are able to manipulate the language enough to work through concepts in the classroom. When they come to my class, I help them with whatever essays, reading, graphic organizers and other work they have to complete for regular classes and I am able to see their struggles more clearly. At the end of each class, I ask them to fill out the exit ticket, where they must provide a concrete answer to at least one of the questions/statements and then I have data to work with when I meet with my mainstream colleagues.
What about the little ones?
For those of us who work with elementary ESL students, we know that there are a lot more resources available to track their progress. Children respond well to pictures and to drawing, they like to move around and show what they know as well as watch and mimic. That makes the task of assessing younger English learners a little bit easier.
Still, there are never too many tools and with the trend nowadays for the students to take responsibility for their own learning, younger ESL students are no exception. Below is a sample of an exit ticket for younger students.
That is all for today. What are your favorite tools for assessing your English learners’ progress? Share with us in the comments below!
