Assuring Quality Language Instruction

This article was first published in WestEd's R&D Alert^®, 2001.

California law requires that teachers who instruct English language learners (ELLs) must possess appropriate certification. Easier legislated than accomplished: A recent survey finds that over three quarters of the state’s teachers with no such certification report having ELLs in their classrooms.

To address this gap, the California Teachers Association (CTA) offers a certification program for teachers of ELLs and enlisted WestEd’s Assessment and Standards Development Services (ASDS) to develop a system to assess whether participants qualify for certification.

“This assessment system is receiving concerted attention because of the need to certify practicing teachers to support English language learners,” says Sri Ananda, Co-Director of ASDS.

The CTA program focuses on theories of second language acquisition and instructional strategies to help students learn English and grade-level subject matter. Participants are assessed in two ways, explains Ananda. One is through a comprehensive formative assessment, or case study, completed during the program. Participants then take a summative assessment consisting of multiplechoice and short-answer items.

“It’s a very fair assessment that validates teachers’ experience,” says Denise Stewart, a high school English as a second language teacher in San Jose who has taught the course. A high percentage of the more than 6,000 teachers who have taken the CTA course since 1998 believe the process made them more knowledgeable about teaching ELLs than teachers certified through other programs.

Participants conduct case studies of ELLs while they are learning language acquisition theories and different instructional strategies. The teachers must apply these concepts in explaining how they would deal with a specific student and in designing lesson plans and assessment tasks to address the student’s needs.

The case study portion of the assessment process includes valuable feedback from peers and other instructors. “The approach helps to reinforce what teachers learn during the course,” Ananda says. “When they try different instructional strategies, there are some important moments of insight.”