Assessment of Content and Language on the Heels of the New Standards: Challenges and Opportunities for English Language Learners

Author: Kenji Hakuta

Consulting Editors: Charlene Rivera and Patricia Gandara

This paper will explore the view that the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics, and the next generation standards in K-12 science being developed by Achieve, Inc. based on the National Academy of Sciences framework, are the leading edge of a wave of realization that language is the key to developing knowledge in academic subjects for all students. The author will use the following assumptions:

i.the wave that began with the humanities and math will spread beyond science to social studies, art, and all other school subjects, and lead to a new mapping of the academic fields with respect to language;

ii.advances in the fields of formal and computational linguistics, natural language processing, and sociolinguistics will create new opportunities through which the language mapping of content knowledge will be automated to high levels of language functions, going well beyond vocabulary structure, grammatical form, and semantic relations;

iii.there will be a seamless transition between auditory and digitized representations of speech via automatic speech recognition and production;

iv.there will be ubiquitous digital access to all computational resources for students and teachers, both in and out of the classroom, and that the boundaries between classroom content and content available on the web will become blurry and meaningless; bilingualism/multilingualism will become a norm rather than a marked case, and that this will be driven by demographic shifts as well as technological developments in machine translation.

The author will also assume that the pattern of underperformance of English language learners (ELLs) as a subgroup will persist, mostly due to confounds with parental literacy and recency of immigration, but that there will be increased recognition of the fact that those students who do become bilingual (those students who are currently labeled “reclassified fluent English proficient students”) enjoy a variety of cognitive and social benefits due to their bilingualism. The question that the author will address in this paper is: what kind of formative and summative assessment system makes sense to maximally benefit ELLs given these assumptions?  VIEW DRAFT