by Sarah Ottow 

While schools typically already have an array of summative and interim assessment measures in place, we often lack “fair and square” assessment that builds on ELLs’ strengths and shows growth over time.  In a previous blog, I wrote about the need for a more equitable and valid “photo album” approach to ELL assessment.  In this post, I will share specific strategies for formative language assessment that can show student growth over time, help teachers plan next steps, and supplement an assessment system that goes beyond measures that don’t necessarily tell the whole story of English language development. 

English Language Learners (ELLs) greatly benefit from an English Language Development (ELD) assessment approach that focuses on growth over time of the complex and nuanced process of developing academic language. This formative language assessment approach can put the role of assessment back into the hands of teachers, back into the hands of students, and back into the true spirit and the actual meaning of the word “to assess”.  The Latin root word for “assessment” is assidere which means to sit beside.  In my work as an ELL specialist, I advocate for educators to intentionally sit beside their students to more deeply understand and support their learning trajectory at the classroom level.

The Need for Formative Language Assessment

We know that formative assessment is a way to consistently observe and document student performance so that both the teacher and the student gets feedback on progress.  For our ELLs, formative language assessment allows teachers to get a handle on where students are in their English language development between large-scale language proficiency assessments.  Additionally, because formative language assessment focuses specifically on academic language, we can get more information to augment large-scale content-based assessments (i.e. PARCC, Smarter Balanced) or interim content assessments (i.e. MAP, DIBELS).

English language development for ELLs is messy, dynamic and can change across sociocultural contexts.  Many teachers need support in explicitly teaching and assessing academic language and often don’t know where to start.  By implementing formative language assessments, teachers can better understand their students’ language development in their content area and become stronger teachers of academic language.  After all, all teachers are indeed language teachers! 

A Balanced Classroom-Based Assessment Model

When I served as ELL assessment consultant for the Massachusetts Department of Education’s English as a Second Language Model Curriculum Units in 2015, I worked with teacher teams to unpack the academic language demands or success criteria for units of study.  We created an assessment model that included a pre-assessment writing prompt for the beginning of the unit, a “language checkpoint” for the middle of the unit, a final curriculum-embedded performance task for the end of the unit, and rich formative assessment strategies to check understanding throughout.  Our goal was to write units of study that model for teachers across the state how to plan for, teach and assess explicit language features to accelerate academic language development.  We referred to WIDA’s ELD Standards Framework’s Features of Academic Language in planning language demands and assessments to show the nuances of language growth throughout a unit of study.  We also embedded appropriate language functions and language supports as recommended by the WIDA ELD Standards.  In this role, when I trained curriculum writers, wrote sample assessments, and created guidance documents for teams, I referred to my previous experience as a bilingual reading specialist as well as Formative Assessment for English Learners by MacDonald, Boals, Castro, Cook, Lundburg & White, 2015.  This resource has been tremendously helpful to me in my ongoing work as a consultant promoting more equitable assessment of English learners at the classroom level on up.

This process described here is generally the same process I use when supporting teachers and leaders as a coach and as a facilitator in Confianza’s continuing education courses, Differentiation & Academic Language Instruction.  Our goal at Confianza is to teach educators how to implement a more equitable assessment approach, which, in turn, often leads to more responsive instruction.  Let’s not forget the intimate relationship between instruction and assessment.  Much like the proverbial chicken and the egg, we can start with either one.

If we start with instruction, I recommend that we first get clear about the language demands of our lessons by conducting in an academic language analysis of text or other pieces of language students are expected to interact with during a lesson or unit of study.  At Confianza, we call this process developing and using our “language lens” and we promote this practice for all teachers since all teachers are teachers of both language and content K-12 across every classroom.

Through this academic language analysis, teachers to get clear about what language is necessary for ELLs’ success and then plan what language supports will be used to facilitate ELLs’ language development at their current language level.  Language supports can include, but are not limited to, interactive word walls and visuals, sentence stems and graphic organizers, as well as promoting student-to-student academic conversations.  It’s imperative that we refer to the language level data we have on students to be sure that our instruction is developmentally appropriate.  In addition to considering what language supports we intentionally plan for, we should also be self-assessing to ensure that our curriculum integrates students’ strengths and backgrounds.  Once we get clear about what academic language we expect students to use, how language-rich our classroom is and how we integrate students’ lives in the curriculum, then we can formatively assess their use of that language.

If we start with assessment, we look at student work to get a “window” inside learners’ language development.  To accomplish this, I teach teachers to use a protocol called a Language Snapshot to give us a “checkpoint” of academic language use.  The Language Snapshot is a protocol for teachers to use their “language lens” to analyze English language development in their content area.  The process starts with reviewing a piece of student writing (or recorded student speaking).  Then, we refer to Performance Definitions (in Massachusetts, we use WIDA’s tool for speaking and writing yet you can use the language development tools from your local context).  By keeping the language levels in mind, we can then use the sample to understand where the student is on the continuum of language development.  After that, we make note of the “pluses” and “deltas” of that student’s current level of performance, keeping the success criteria, or academic language demands, in mind of that lesson or task.  Finally, we determine next steps for instruction, or teaching points that will come to the student in the form of descriptive feedback for language development going forward. 

It important not to overwhelm the student with too many pieces of feedback, or next steps.  Long gone are the days of a red-pen-covered piece of writing.  Instead, focus on what few next steps would be developmentally appropriate for that student and how to frame that feedback for maximum student engagement.  Again, as mentioned above, we also need to be sure our instruction is appropriate for the student’s language level.  Many teams I work with in states that belong to the WIDA Consortium rely on the WIDA Can Do Descriptors as a resource to show appropriate instructional tasks at different language levels.

Student Ownership

Many teachers I work with move directly from the Language Snapshot process to student goal setting, where students co-create language goals with the teacher.  For example, “I will use more vivid words” with the help of a student vocabulary notebook and class anchor charts showing expanded technical vocabulary words.  It’s critical to promote student ownership of the assessment process.  Another way to do that is to integrate peer assessment strategies like having students read their work to each other while using a peer editing checklist.

Sustainable Formative Language Assessment

In order to create a sustainable formative assessment approach, it is important to determine what works for your context.  One leader I work with has a simple method in place at his high school.  Each content area team analyzes student work by using their own rubric for content alongside language proficiency tools.  The teams consider the success criteria for that task while also referring to language level data for ELL students.  Teachers use the language levels to determine at what language level students’ work is at.  In other words, if a student has written a biology report with the linguistic complexity of phrases and short sentences, that is appropriate for an ELL at Level 2.  Thus, if that student has been deemed a Level 1 or 2, then that performance is acceptable.  Another leader I have worked developed rubrics that were content-based on one side and language-based on the other side so that teachers would always consider language development when assessing content standards.

These examples may certainly make us wonder about implications for supports used during instruction as well as task design of the tasks, but these points are beyond the scope of this discussion.  The take-away here is to own formative language assessment in your own setting so that ELD is “on the radar”, so to speak.  Sometimes teachers ask me, “But can I focus on ELD?  Aren’t we just supposed to use content data and ACCESS data?”  My response is that sometimes we need to be ambassadors for our ELLs in a world of schooling that is not always normed on this population nor necessarily using a “language lens” to consider the unique assets and nuances of this culturally and linguistically diverse population.  Sometimes we need to exercise professional judgment to do what is right for our students.

Other Considerations for a Photo Album Approach

What’s important to remember is that formative assessment is flexible and intended to focus on feedback for both the teacher and the student.  Thus, we may not need to implement this formative language assessment process for each student; we may need to mainly focus on priority ELL students, those that require more intentional supports to be successful.  However, some classrooms and schools have such a large population of ELL students that they find it important to conduct quarterly or monthly formative language assessments of their entire caseload.  This allows assessment to serve the purpose of being both formative and interim.  I highly recommend that teachers keep portfolios to show individual student growth over time and have student work be the centerpiece in parent-teacher conferences and school data meetings.  Data walls can be constructed using multiple measures of language data which can bolster a more traditional content-based assessment system.  In these ways, we can offer a “photo album” approach to show progress over time, celebrating students’ journey of academic language development.

To view a webinar on this topic by Sarah Ottow presented for the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), see here: