Assessing Multilingual Learners’ Multiliteracies
By Mikyung Kim Wolf, Lorraine Sova, and Alexis A. López
Multiliteracy today is more than merely reading and writing, but includes visual and oral communication in widely differing contexts, and has been incorporated in school standards.
The authors engaged in an R&D project to develop a sample tool that could more accurately assess multilingual learners’ progress toward a rigorous educational goal. In developing this tool, they “adopted the principles of socio-culturally responsive assessment and culturally sustaining pedagogy as our guiding frameworks.” These are listed in the article.
The authors collaborated with four English learner teachers to create a tool that provided information through different modalities and which offered various means of demonstrating subject knowledge.
They created three levels of texts with glossaries and visuals for the mixed-leveled classes in the study. The videos for the lessons had closed-captioning, and were broken into sections. They also had guided notes, and some of the materials were in Spanish.
The study ended with positive feedback from the teachers.
The conclusion was that “To support culturally sustaining pedagogy that recognizes and embraces the diverse characteristics of all students, new thinking and approaches to assessment design are necessary.”
Here you can find more information and view images of the tasks.
Although students who are fluent in two languages are more successful in school than those who are monolingual, there are still methodologies, policies, and misconceptions that view limited English proficiency as a deficit and cause hindrances for emergent bilinguals.
