Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Ortiz's workshop: Assessment of English language learners – evidence based evaluation and practice


Here is a whole day workshop with Dr. Samuel Ortiz about assessment of bilingual/bicultural children.  Ortiz presents with a lot of enthusiasm, discusses important  issues, presents interesting slides (though not always easy to read), and seems like a nice person (who is also generous with his materials).

I recommend reading this post before watching the sixth part.  
  
Part one – an introduction.


Part two: BICS and CALP (whichI also discussed here);  the importance of CALP in the native language;  misconceptions about language acquisition, learning and the development.


Part three: the 30 million word gap (about which I wrote here), a very interesting comparison between the hours of English exposure (during formal school years) that are experienced by a monolingual versus a bilingual child; bilingual education. 


Part four: differences in the efficiency of different educational programs for bilinguals:  Two-way bilingual, Late-exit bilingual and content ESL, Early-exit bilingual and content ESL, Content-based ESL and ESL pullout traditional; the influence of SES on 2nd language acquisition; the difficulties bilinguals face when competing with monolinguals for higher education;  when an English language learner is taught reading in his native language, it promotes reading achievement in English.

This video is very interesting.


Part five: assessment methods for bilinguals;  methods that compromise the validity of the tests (testing of limits, repeating instructions, mediation, accepting answers in different languages, cancelling time limits, using interpreters); language reduced tests – advantages and disadvantages; cultural and linguistic bias in nonverbal tests.


Part six: the C-LIM method; two steps of assessment:  assessment in English with the C-LIM, if the tests are valid -  assessment in the native language (of the areas of difficulties found in the first step, for validation).


Part seven: the C-LIM software; further explanations about using C-LIM.


Part eight: Using the C-LIM matrix with 9 case studies; language and cultural difference as an exclusionary factor for LD; other exclusionary factors; a little about assessing LD with  CHC theory.

 A very interesting video.



No comments:

Post a Comment