What Gets Lost When English-Only Writing Assessment Is Used to Assess Writing Proficiency in Spanish-English Emerging Bilingual Learners?

Abstract

Recent analyses of wide-scale writing assessment outcomes indicate that English writing achievement for fourth and fifth grade emerging bilingual learners continues to be an area of great concern. Utilizing the theory of holistic bilingualism and a mixed methods design, this study examines the writing skills of 44 emerging bilingual fourth and fifth graders. The purpose of this paper was to compare and correlate various writing outcomes as measured by the state's high stakes writing assessment, English language proficiency writing assessment, and an informal biliterate writing rubric. Results indicate that the majority of students are not acquiring proficiency in English writing as measured by English-only assessments. When students' Spanish and English outcomes are considered holistically, students' outcomes in Spanish surpassed English for the majority. Findings indicate the potential for a writing assessment protocol that is intentionally biliterate and that displays Spanish and English, together as a part of the assessment process.

Always at the Bottom: Ideologies in Assessment of Emergent Bilinguals

“…While translanguaging has taken root in literacy classrooms by supporting students' access to curriculum (Fu, 2009;Machado et al, 2019;Velasco & García, 2014), engagement in classroom learning (Ascenzi-Moreno & Espinosa, 2018), and identities as learners (Ascenzi-Moreno & Quiñones, 2020;Kabuto, 2018), its impact on formative reading assessment has only recently been explored. This research confirms that because the assessment of emergent bilinguals has been developed within monolingual frameworks, these assessments provide an inadequate and incomplete evaluation of their abilities (Abedi, 2011;Ascenzi-Moreno, 2018;Bauer et al, 2020;Escamilla et al, 2017;Sánchez et al, 2018;Schissel, 2020;Shohamy, 2011).…”

“…It has been widely noted that assessments are created with the "native" speaker of a language as the norm, rather than through a lens that recognizes that bilinguals organically mesh linguistic and social resources as they read (Escamilla et al, 2017;García, 2009;Mahoney, 2017;Valdés & Figueroa, 1994). Thus, reading assessments of emergent bilinguals are almost exclusively used to gauge reading development monolingually (Ascenzi-Moreno, 2016;Kabuto, 2017).…”

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

“…Second, increasingly more options for early biliteracy are available to parents of HL children in many host countries. For example, in the United States dual-language schooling and paired literacy programs are being more widely implemented than ever before (e.g., Escamilla, Butvilofsky, & Hopewell, 2017;Kovelman, Salah-Ud-Din, Berens, & Petitto, 2015). Third, many adult participants in HLD studies may have been language brokers for their families during childhood and adolescence, and it is known that the experience boosts metalinguistic awareness, as investigated by educational linguists (Angelelli, 2017;Valdés, 2003), psycholinguists (López & Vaid, 2017), and sociologists (Guan, Nash, & Orellana, 2016).…”

“COVID has Brought Us Closer”: A Proleptic Approach to Understanding ESL Teachers’ Practices in Supporting ELLs In and After the Pandemic

“…Given the considerable size of the ELL population, it becomes particularly concerning that persistent achievement gap between ELLs and their native English-speaking peers has been reported from studies on immigrant children's social and academic integration in Canadian schools (Deschambault, 2015;Garnett, 2010;Gunderson, 2007;Pavlov, 2015). This disturbing finding is consistently corroborated by the evidence yielded from studies conducted in other North American context that ELLs are not sufficiently supported in their academic learning in the public school system (Escamilla et al, 2018;Guo & Maitra, 2017;Han & Cheng, 2011). On the one hand, teacher education courses have been failing to either sensitize teacher candidates to cultural and linguistic diversity they are expected to encounter in future classrooms or to provide pedagogical tools or strategies to grapple with these differences (Durgunoglu & Hughes, 2010;Gunderson, 2000;Li & Jee, 2021;Webster & Valeo, 2011).…”