Strategizing assessment to support emerging bilingual students: a focus on the home language

Abstract

Abstract Both educators and students in the United States feel the continuous pressure to improve achievement scores as a form of validation for their work and success. However, emerging bilingual (EBs) learners encounter barriers within assessments that break the assumptions of validity, reliability, and fairness and prevent them from demonstrating their true knowledge. This is worsened when assumptions about EBs' academic capacity are extracted from those assessment results. This paper focuses on the use of assessment for and as learning for emerging bilingual (EB) students. Specific attention is given to the use of the students' home language as a resource in evaluating their knowledge and how teachers may address some of the inequitable practices to prepare EBs not only to be successful academically, but to demonstrate it in today's assessment world.