This practical resource book will familiarize teachers, staff developers, and administrators with the latest thinking on alternatives to traditional assessment. It will prepare them to implement authentic assessment in the ESL/bilingual classroom and to incorporate it into instructional planning.

This classroom-ready resource provides teachers in grades K-8 with specific assessments that can be administered to English language learners within the regular classroom. Long overdue and with a focus on the needs of English language learners (ELLs) within the classroom, Instructional Assessment of English Language Learners is a unique book designed to teach readers the basic concepts of assessing English. Today's education courses place an increasing emphasis on the regular classroom teacher to instruct and assess English language learners. Yet, classroom teachers have few resources available to them in regard to assessing ELLs within their classrooms. This book helps readers master the assessments to be administered to English learners and cover a range of literacy skills deemed necessary for English language acquisition and reproduction, while also assessing the student's literacy skills in their primary language. The overarching goal of this book is to enable teachers to acquire a deep understanding of the value of instructional assessment for ELLs and the importance of evaluating the results to provide the students with immediate, appropriate and meaningful instruction. The book addresses the specific areas of language arts related to the development, acquisition, and reproduction of the English language: oral language development and vocabulary; concepts of print and the alphabetic strategies; word recognition and word identification strategies; reading fluency; reading comprehension; written language development and spelling; content area literacy; procedural knowledge; and problem-solving strategies. The strategies presented in this text are research-based and are known to increase reading comprehension for ELLs.

This book examines, through case studies of elementary and secondary schools, how five schools have developed “authentic,” performance-based assessments of students’ learning, and how this work has interacted with and influenced the teaching and learning experiences students encounter in school. This important and timely book reveals the changing dynamics of classroom life as it moves from more traditional pedagogy to one that asks students to master intellectual and practical skills that are eminently transferable to “real-life” social settings and workplaces. “The issue of assessment comes first, but we see in the following case studies how it becomes powerfully enveloped in the processes of learning and teaching, of informing students, teachers, parents, and others of ‘how the children are doing.’ The portraits explicitly and implicitly suggest a deep, fair, and defensible way to answer the question ‘How’m I doing?’ in a manner that helps this child and eventually every child.” —From the Foreword by Theodore R. Sizer “Informative and thought provoking.” —American Journal of Education

This textbook is a comprehensive introduction to the assessment of students in K-12 schools who use two or more languages in their daily life: English Language Learners (ELLs), or Emergent Bilinguals. The book includes a thorough examination of the policy, history and assessment/measurement issues that educators should understand in order to best advocate for their students. The author presents a decision-making framework called PUMI (Purpose, Use, Method, Instrument) that practitioners can use to better inform assessment decisions for bilingual children. The book will be an invaluable resource in teacher preparation programs, but will also help policy-makers and educators make better decisions to support their students.

This book expertly illustrates the important process of authentic assessment and evaluation in the construction and dissemination of educational knowledge. One of the key strengths of this book is the diversity of contexts in which the various aspects of assessment are evidenced and discussed.

Build the bridges for English language learners to reach success! This thoroughly updated edition of Gottlieb’s classic delivers a complete set of tools, techniques, and ideas for planning and implementing instructional assessment of ELLs. The book includes: A focus on academic language use in every discipline, from mathematics to social studies, within and across language domains Emphasis on linguistically and culturally responsive assessment as a key driver for measuring academic achievement A reconceptualization of assessment “as,” “for,” and “of” learning Reflection questions to stimulate discussion around how students, teachers, and administrators can all have a voice in decision making

"The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Assessment aims to present in one volume an up-to-date guide to the central areas of assessing the second language performance of English by speakers of other languages. This volume provides snapshots of significant issues and trends that have shaped language assessment in the past and highlights the current state of our understanding of these issues"--

Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices is designed to offer a comprehensive survey of essential principles and tools for second language assessment. Its first and second editions have been successfully used in teacher-training courses, teacher certification curricula, and TESOL master of arts programs. As the third in a trilogy of teacher education textbooks, it is designed to follow H. Douglas Brown's other two books, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (sixth edition, Pearson Education, 2014) and Teaching by Principles(fourth edition, Pearson Education, 2015). References to those two books are made throughout the current book. Language Assessment features uncomplicated prose and a systematic, spiraling organization. Concepts are introduced with practical examples, understandable explanations, and succinct references to supportive research. The research literature on language assessment can be quite complex and assume that readers have technical knowledge and experience in testing. By the end of Language Assessment, however, readers will have gained access to this not-so-frightening field. They will have a working knowledge of a number of useful, fundamental principles of assessment and will have applied those principles to practical classroom contexts. They will also have acquired a storehouse of useful tools for evaluating and designing practical, effective assessment techniques for their classrooms.

Theoretical and practical information about assessment in the bilingual and English-language-learner classrooms.