Exploring the Use of a Dual Language Assessment Task to Assess Young English Learners

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to create and prototype a dual language assessment task that allows young English learners to use their entire cadre of linguistic resources (language and non-verbal resources) to obtain information about their emergent language abilities. We developed a dual language assessment task in which students described a picture, predicted a story, and retold a story. This task allows students to translanguage, that is, to use all their linguistic resources in ways that fit their communicative needs, and the students’ responses are scored regardless of the language(s) or communicative strategies that are used. In this paper, we report our findings concerning how 17 kindergarten Spanish-speaking English learners in the United States interacted with the dual language assessment task, whether and how they used their language (e.g., English and Spanish) and non-verbal (e.g., body movements, gestures, gazes, visual cues, posture, drawings, signs) resources, and what we learned about their cross-linguistic emergent language abilities.