Evaluating very young ELLs' skills in English

A few recent articles and posts have raised the issue of identifying preschool English language learners in order to support their English language development. These include the Illinois proposal to regulate the education of these students by Mary Ann Zehr of Edweek (http://tinyurl.com/25vnuv6) and as well recent posting on Colorín Colorado (http://www.colorincolorado.org/). The responses to these articles have ranged from very positive to very negative. While many see the benefits of early identification, concerns have been raised about the reliability, validity, and practicality of formal assessments aimed at 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds.

It is always appropriate to ask questions of assessments, especially when new assessment regulations are proposed. This ensures proper review of proposed policies and allows for appropriate quality control in assessment implementation. As a publisher of a test that is intended for preschool English language learners, the Pre-IPT, Ballard & Tighe can provide some concrete responses to the concerns that have been raised.

Firstly, assessment design and administration procedures should always be adapted to the intended test takers. In the case of the Pre-IPT, the test is conducted as a one-on-one, untimed interaction between an examiner and a student. The test is built around a game board-like storyboard with characters that are moved on the board as the story-based test proceeds. The examiner follows a script that includes possible follow-up questions if the student makes an unexpected response. The test items are grouped into increasingly difficult sets, and if the student's responses indicate that his or her proficiency ceiling has been reached, the testing is stopped. The test concentrates on English language proficiency: vocabulary, grammar, comprehension, and verbal expression in English. The cognitive processes during the test are concrete, concentrating on naming, description and very short narration, in order to ensure full concentration on English language proficiency. During training, examiners are instructed to act in a friendly way while refraining from directly providing answers for students in order to ensure that students get language support if they need it.

Secondly, in terms of testing policy, Ballard & Tighe recognizes that the policies that test users adopt for test implementation play a major role in the fairness and equity of testing procedures for the target population. Ballard & Tighe recommends procedures similar to those proposed by the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. For any high-stakes decision, we recommend using more than one kind of empirical information to support the decision, such as identification and placement. We also recommend that clear procedures related to adjusting incorrect decisions be established. For placement decisions for example, such procedures could include a review period of one month after the placement decision on the basis of the student's performence in the designated program as made by the student's teachers. As for the actual testing procedures, policymakers should establish rules that ensure equal testing conditions for all students. One such policy could be always seeking test administration by familiar personnel, i.e. no "cold testing" before preschool begins. No procedures can completely avoid misidentification that may result from "bad fit" between examiner and student or day-to-day variation in "willingness to talk," for example, but they may lessen the severity of the effects.