Understanding and Improving how K-12 Multilinguals are Taught: Supporting Multilinguals

Understanding and Improving how K-12 Multilinguals are Taught: Supporting Multilinguals details instructional strategies that can be used to better assess multilingual learners which are more improved than the existing evaluations. The author argues that assessments for multilingual learners need to be improved due to inequities within the public-school systems, and that assessments for students in K12 schools are not equitable. The author also discusses strategies for welcoming and supporting multilingual learners in the classroom. The instructional strategies outlined for K12 educators includes offering students multiple test-taking options, ensuring that assessments are translated into students’ respective languages, and allowing multilingual learners to take assessments in groups or pairs. These improvement strategies have been developed by using feedback from dual-language teachers in the K12 public school system. The assessment issues that will be addressed include inequity within assessments administered to multilingual learners, the way assessments are structured and developed at the district and school level, the consideration of the immigrant experience as these assessments are being developed, the roles of school boards in considering immigrant experiences while creating these assessments, the role of the teachers of multilingual learners, assessment strategies to support multilingual learners, and strategies that are effective in creating inclusive classrooms for native and multilingual English speakers.