Help educators understand cultural differences
that may be important to consider.
Recommendation:
Develop a good relationship with the ESL
teachers. Collaboration related to teaching and
assessment strategies based on vision and
language needs can be shared. Also, you can
share materials and other resources that may
be needed by the student.
Ongoing classroom assessments, observations, and performance assessments are critical for teachers to use.
Standardized tools often offer limited information to guide us with instruction for emergent
bilinguals, particularly for those with visual impairments because of problems with design
and inappropriate accommodations.
It is difficult to separate knowledge of language
from content knowledge.
Emergent bilinguals are "moving targets" in
terms of language fluency, so results of formal
assessments given once per year are used in
a limited .
Frequent, informal assessments that include
observation in different settings and performance assessments provide more useful information while ELLs are not yet fluent English
speakers.
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Recommendations:
Analyze the language of your tests to determine if your tests contain language that is too
advanced for the proficiency level of your
emergent bilingual students. Is the test a content test or a language test?
Consider different ways of obtaining information about students' academic growth that are
not always based on language.
