How can teachers, schools, and school districts utilize assessment instruments to build an ESL/Bilingual program in which limited English proficient students can grow in their language abilities and be successful in the school environment?

In order to ensure that ESL students receive the best possible assessment tools, strong ties must exist between learning targets and assessment tools, and assessment tools and "real life." This is necessary because of the long-standing failure of assessment tools to match successfully what is being tested with what the tool is intended to test. In addition, assessments often have been non-contextual, creating unfamiliar scenarios for the ESL student that do not match those found in real life.

In every classroom, including the ESL classroom, teachers should have a system that allows for both formal and informal assessment of students. This is especially important in the ESL classroom for a number of reasons. Regardless of a student’s background, test anxiety is very real. When a student knows that she is being tested for the purpose of being rated or graded, she will to a certain extent feel nervous, and this can in turn affect performance. Therefore, teachers must be on the look out for ways to assess students more informally, when students are more relaxed and display targeted behaviors more "naturally." Another problem exists in the breakdown of the actual assessment. For example, a test for listening is not very strong if the tester merely reads a word and the student points at a matching picture on a four-picture template.

Because students will be taking the skills acquired and sharpened in school out into the "real world," teachers and test makers should feel compelled to create assessment tools that will require students to perform tasks similar to those performed in real life. If a student’s ability to communicate a message clearly through writing is to be tested, the student should be given a prompt that asks him to do just that. New national and state standards provide learning targets along with benchmarks for student performance. These standards are based on an understanding of what skills are required to function successfully within society, and as such are aimed at creating classroom curricula that ask students to demonstrate behaviors the will use outside the classroom. Assessments inside the classroom must therefore be tied to the standards such that assessment tools require students to perform these "real life" tasks.

Because students are not all the same, and because students perform better in some areas than others, assessments must be varied. Formal and informal assessment has already been mentioned, but this is not enough, because some teachers make a habit out of watching group discussions on Monday through Wednesday, administering a reading test on Thursday, then a vocabulary quiz on Friday. This type of "routine" can be helpful, but assessment tools should be varied in order to provide students an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in different contexts. Group tasks, speeches, letters, expository writing, partner activities, and portfolios are all examples of assessments that if constructed properly can be reliable, valid, and hopefully, non-biased.

Yet even with all of these varied, reliable, and valid assessment measures in place in the classroom, there is still one more thing that teachers can do, and this is to ask the student to consider their own learning. No one knows a student better than the student herself. She knows her strengths and weaknesses, and should be given a forum for how to approach areas of improvement. Self-reflection provides students with this opportunity to think back on what they did or how they performed on specific assessments or in certain classes. It can awaken them to meta-cognitive processes that help them consider how they learn, and where strengths and weaknesses lie. This type of self-empowerment can build self-esteem and help the teacher better understand the student’s learning style.

Self-reflection encourages teachers to provide students with an opportunity to investigate and analyze their own learning, yet the responsibility for encouraging and monitoring student learning is still on the shoulders of the teacher. For this reason, not only does the ESL instructor have a personal and professional responsibility to maintain high standards for his students, but to maintain these standards for himself as well. This means providing a classroom environment that stays in tune with the contemporary and long-standing needs of students, and staying in touch with studies and trends in the ESL classroom. If an administration can give support to the ESL program, then this provides another building block to a strong ESL curriculum, further enhancing the chances for student success.