Art Un ticle I.1 ited Sta In the ates News - Woodring College of ...

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for longer periods of time and more gradual exposure to English, possibly circumventing theclustering of intense language needs during a particular phase of second language readingdevelopment. While the district under study here did have such a program, many districts withfewer language minority students may not be able to provide carefully sequenced programs.Those who oppose the creation of special assessments for transitional students often advocatereporting students’ performance on one assessment used for all students but removing the highstakes associated with those scores for students in the transition process. That adjustment doesnot satisfactorily answer the need for valid information about such students, nor does it addressthe ethical issues associated with putting students through potentially frustrating and painfulexercises from which they gain little, if any, benefit. In this case, however, for a number ofreasons, including the nature of the assessment and the scoring procedures, the district PBA leftteachers disheartened with the dismal performances of their students without receiving anyuseful information for instruction. In contrast, the TPBA gave direction for instruction, asdiscussed in the previous section.This study was designed to shed light on the performance of transition students on a test ofreading comprehension specifically designed with their linguistic profiles in mind. Wespecifically wanted to know whether an alternative test would yield more information relevantfor instruction than the district-wide test had done. In considering the generalizability of thefindings, a number of issues emerged.While the above approach yielded much information on the form and quality of responses toselected texts, it did not provide comparative information. A useful next step would be to givesubsets of students, matched for particular characteristics, similar types of performanceassessments using different texts to help determine the influence of the texts themselves onstudent performance.It would also be of interest to have a subset of students take both the district PBA and thetransitional PBA to more specifically compare performances. Information on the transitionstudents’ educational backgrounds, level of Spanish oral fluency and literacy, and oral Englishfluency levels would enable us to make more inferences about the relation between these factorsand English reading comprehension. Ethnographic methodology could be used to gaininformation on instructional practices that may have contributed to the prevalence ofperformance at the literal level.In addition to these specific research design challenges, the issue of assessing reading throughwriting poses particular dilemmas for transition students and is a critical limitation of theapproach of both the PBA and the TPBA. It is likely that additional means of assessing reading(think-alouds, portfolios, exhibitions, oral discussions) would yield more definitive informationon students’ ability to meet the standards and on the reading process itself(see Fitzgerald, 1995for a review of various methodologies used to study second language reading).Another issue raised by these findings is the feasibility of creating assessment instrumentsspecific to particular groups of students. The cost of test development and the difficulty infinding knowledgeable scorers would present significant problems to many districts. However,as discussed above, the staff development model adopted in this district demonstrated aneconomical way of accomplishing the test development at the same time that teacher expertisewas well used and further developed. The use of knowledgeable district employees kept the costmanageable and provided professional development opportunities for the teachers whoseexpertise had previously been underutilized. For less equipped districts, pairing bilingual andEnglish-only teachers for scoring purposes may be one solution to this dilemma (possibly even© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved178
using inter-district teams). In these cases significant attention would need to be paid to theestablishment of inter-rater reliability.The work group realized that one assessment measure could not definitively answer complexquestions of why particular response patterns occurred, especially when the assessment wasscored holistically. The clustering of scores at the 2 or 3 level may have been due to processingfactors, but could also have been influenced by instructional factors, writing ability, theparticular texts chosen, or a combination of factors. Without more information about thestudents’ previous Spanish instruction, more information about results on multiple measures ofreading comprehension, and/or a comparison group using other texts, it is still difficult to answerthese questions.Perhaps the most important result of having a specially designed assessment for students intransition was the opportunity to break the cycle of failure and the culture of discouragementover the school performance of language minority students. The Transitional Performance BasedAssessment allowed teachers to see what their students were able to do and gave theminformation on how to build on their strengths and, through appropriate instruction, guidestudents to more proficient use of English and fuller access to educational opportunities.© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved179
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"Those who arrive by age 12 or 13 m
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Article I.2 Are Signed Languages "R
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Biological analyses of the status o
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and beyond, speaking and signing ch
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Conclusion: Are Signed Languages Re
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Article I.3 The Interpreter: Has a
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A few weeks earlier, I had called F
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“We struggled even getting to the
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herself by strapping a cassette rec
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In 1998, after nine years as the ch
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momentary burst of excitement that
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can shape core grammar. Because the
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The authors compared animal and hum
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monkey moved. He followed it with h
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delight, fear, laughter, and surpri
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Piipaío in a hut: Pirahã huts typ
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LEP students, and equitable organiz
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4. Second language development crea
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curriculum or "teaching to the test
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portfolio work was scanned and stor
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experiences of many groups of stude
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While not disagreeing that interpre
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sound educational practice, however
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arises from the efforts to abstract
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Article II.2 Cross-Cultural Communi
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males who can serve as positive rol
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Understanding another culture is a
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Pets and AnimalsWhich animals are v
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to teach standard English is reflec
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Asking personal questions of a pers
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Using Cross Cultural Communication
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Why Do Nonstandard English-Speaking
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Before beginning to teach standard
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• Negative attitudes toward low p
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New standardized tests and assessme
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Each of the behaviors listed above
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Article II.3 Hard Work Hypothesis:
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each point higher in SES, students
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This case does not provide strong s
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Article II.4 Language Acquisition a
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1992, p. XI). These researchers, wh
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comprehend a word within a specific
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more to the truthfulness of the chi
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This idea of “semilingualism” c
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Article III.1 A Brief Description o
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take different lengths of time to c
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example, should involve the same co
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As with all stages of BICS acquisit
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Assessment techniques at stage 3 ca
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different. Therefore, the social di
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integrative motivation. Basically,
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(Ellis, 1985; Hakuta, 1986). Howeve
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that sociocultural processes have o
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Article III.3 How Children Acquire
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phonetic units (unique to signed la
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Article III.4 Toward a Sociocultura
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emember is that the fundamental goa
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The best practices models can be th
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By focusing on the dialectic betwee
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intergenerational wisdom shared by
Page 127 and 128: Daily Realities RecappedThe above v
Page 129 and 130: traditions. At a time in our histor
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Page 133 and 134: Speakers communicate fluently, main
Page 135 and 136: question the effects of such attitu
Page 137 and 138: Article IV.3 Culture Change: Effect
Page 139 and 140: and psychological characteristics o
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Page 143 and 144: Article V.1 Assessment in ESL & Bil
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Page 149 and 150: Fourth, ESL and bilingual program s
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Page 153 and 154: Table 1Comparison of Recent Accultu
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Page 159 and 160: Article V.3 Assessment of English L
Page 161 and 162: 8. Change answers only for a very g
Page 163 and 164: Riles, 1979; Jose P. v Ambac, 1983)
Page 165 and 166: proficiency is often underestimated
Page 167 and 168: Finally, when second language reade
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Page 171 and 172: As mentioned above, when the transi
Page 173 and 174: ather than generic adjectives and t
Page 175 and 176: their imagined points of view. Ther
Page 177: English texts and demonstrate progr
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