Butler, F., & Stevens, R., and O’Malley & Valdez Pierce’s Content Assessments.

These readings had similar ideas what is the meaning of content assessments for English Language Learners (ELL). Through content assessments teachers can monitor student progress, determine if they are ready to move on, and if the school had met the expectation for student accountability.

Something that stuck out from O’Malley’s and Valdez Pierce reading was that academic language can take five to seven years, or more for students to master. So this means that student’s who are not taught the content language of assessment will not fare well in the language their taking the assessment. Butler and Steven’s article, on page 410 stated, “different states curriculum do not always align with the curriculum students have been taught”. This is something that needs to be considered when giving content standardized tests. It is not fair that ELL student have to take the test, when it has been taught differently.

Another subject that both articles mentioned was to give some adaptations, or a form of accommodation. Valdez Pierce and O’Malley gave ideas of scaffolding for ELL or English Second Language (ESL) learners. These are done through graphic organizers or semantic maps as listed in figure 7.4 on page 178. Butler and Stevens (B and S) main point of accommodations was that they are not always consistent, especially since each state have different definitions, and that each has different assessments they use to determine the proficiency of the students. Something that each state ignores from B and S’s is counting the scores of ELL students. If states would account these scores, there might be a better picture of weaknesses for all ELL students, and there would be data to compare the scores of ELL’s through out the states.

Our school district has adopted a social studies curriculum called the Social Studies Alive! When I first saw the ideas in this curriculum it reminded me of the SIOP method of teaching. What is lacking for me is the translating it. Our district has a lot of work to do for the Yugtun side of teaching. What they need to meet on before translating this is to come up with a common idea for each translation, and I don’t’ think they have the funding to accomplish this.

Through out the years I’ve taught in the school district is to teach the language in content. As I remember, I’ve attended in services where it was stressed that we need to teach the content language to our students, especially in math. One of the assessments my students had to do was to write up a story problem to go along with a number sentence. They struggled with this, and I was happy when the school district took this assessment out. It was complicated for my students, but I continue to teach them to use the academic language that they see daily with their lessons. What I need to do is to group them into cooperative learning groups so they’d become more familiar to the academic language, instead of me giving them ideas. I need more practice implementing academic language to their daily writing of the contents.