How teachers'perceptions affect the academic and language assessment of immigrant children

Abstract

Recent research evidences inconsistencies in teachers' practice regarding skills assessment of L2 students. Scientific evidence supports that less experienced teachers have lower orientation toward multiple task-tests for non-native students. Research questions: Whether school teachers as having different teaching training and unequal teaching experience with non-native students perceive differently a four-skills scale. Purpose of the study: This study intends to analyse the importance degree between the four skills/tasks: reading, writing, speaking and listening, in the perspective of school teachers. Method: 77 teachers, aged 32-62, with (and without) experience in teaching and adapting materials for immigrant students, divided into six groups according to their scientific domain. Assessment tools included a scale for judgement of four academic tasks adapted from the original "Inventory of Undergraduate and Graduate Level: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Tasks (Rosenfeld, Leung & Ottman, 2001). Main Findings: 1) different degrees of importance attributed by teachers on tasks that should be included in academic and language test for immigrant students; 2) perceptions of teachers are determined by predictors in this order: scientific domain, experience with multicultural classes and lower prediction from teaching service and age; 3) different results between american and portuguese samples answering the same questionnaire.

Learning Styles Determine Different Immigrant Students’ Results in Testing Settings: Relationship Between Nationality of Children and the Stimuli of Tasks

“…Visual learning styles are more prominent for language learning, for instance, with regard to vocabulary retention [28] On the contrary, the auditory preference for language learning is constrained when the individual has limited vocabulary in the target language. The teaching styles (methodologies and strategies administered at classroom) affect also the learning process of different immigrant learners [29] and this matter should be explored in further studies to understand correlation between teaching and learning (involving teachers at regular classroom and the immigrant young students).…”