Investigating the Benefits of Scaffolding in Assessments of Young English Learners: A Case for Scaffolded Retell Tasks

Dynamic Assessment of English Learners in the Content Areas: An Exploratory Study in Fifth‐Grade Science

“…DA of ELs in the content areas also underscores the role of cultural artifacts (Vygotsky, 1994), such as models, in mediating learners’ performances. Traditionally, DA studies have focused on linguistic interactions between mediators and learners, and when artifacts are included in these studies, they are most often used as stimuli for linguistic production (e.g., picture description task; Choi et al., 2019). However, in content areas such as science, multimodal disciplinary artifacts are themselves essential semiotic resources (Grapin, 2019; Lemke, 1998; Morgan & Morrison, 1999).…”

“…Focusing specifically on challenges faced by foreign language learners (e.g., noun‐adjective concordance in Spanish), this work has involved systematically documenting the mediating moves of researchers/teachers and the reciprocating behaviors of learners in DA sessions spanning a variety of settings and formats (e.g., one‐on‐one, group, computerized). Building on Poehner and colleagues’ classroom‐focused work, researchers at Educational Testing Service (Choi, Wolf, Pooler, Sova, & Faulkner‐Bond, 2019; Wolf et al., 2016) have more recently explored applications of DA to large‐scale tests of English proficiency. Choi et al., (2019), for example, demonstrated the “psychometric added‐value” (p. 162) of scaffold‐embedded narrative retell tasks for assessing third‐grade ELs’ oral English proficiency.…”

“…Building on Poehner and colleagues’ classroom‐focused work, researchers at Educational Testing Service (Choi, Wolf, Pooler, Sova, & Faulkner‐Bond, 2019; Wolf et al., 2016) have more recently explored applications of DA to large‐scale tests of English proficiency. Choi et al., (2019), for example, demonstrated the “psychometric added‐value” (p. 162) of scaffold‐embedded narrative retell tasks for assessing third‐grade ELs’ oral English proficiency. However, while these rapidly expanding bodies of research point to the benefits of DA for assessing L2 learners in different contexts and for different purposes, assessing ELs in content classrooms presents a novel challenge, as it requires attending not only to their developing English proficiency but also their developing content proficiency and the connection between the two.…”

The Early Childhood Education Teachers’ Needs of Being Able to Teach English Well

“…In conducting evaluation, teacher should provide appropriate assessment. For example, the assessment which was done by (Choi et al, 2019) provided empirical support for the benefits of using scaffolding for EL assessments in a standardized setting. The kindergarten teachers did not have the fluency or the confidence of native speakers, and, in fact, they modelled grammatical errors, even in repeating the simple sentences in the official lesson plans.…”