Effective classroom assessments can be designed to recognize and build on what multilingual students already do well.
This is the third of a three-part WIDA Snapshot series on classroom assessment that looks at how teachers can: create connected learning goals, use feedback effectively, and enhance their assessment literacy.
This Snapshot examines how developing language assessment literacy, through attention to purposes, principles and practices, supports more informed, strengths-based instructional decisions.
Curie Elementary School’s professional learning campaign is focusing on multiliteracies across the curriculum with each grade-level team exploring a different type of literacy, such as digital, visual, financial, media, and cultural (Castro & Gottlieb, 2021). The third-grade team decides to investigate language assessment literacy to strengthen how the teachers support their multilingual learners through classroom assessment. The teachers want to become more knowledgeable of the role of language and culture in assessment and their impact on students’ language development and achievement. The team discusses the purposes, principles and practices for assessment and makes a pledge to ensure that meaningful evidence from classroom assessment accentuates what students can do.
Language assessment literacy revolves around designing, collecting, interpreting and using information to make informed instructional decisions for multilingual learners’ language development. By examining the why for assessment (its purposes), the what (its underlying principles) and the how (its accompanying practices), language assessment literacy can deepen the learning experiences for multilingual learners. In addition to having clear integrated learning targets and objectives, language assessment literacy should include student voice (Gottlieb, 2023; Butler, 2022).
Purposes
Knowing the purposes for language assessment and their uses are the first steps to assessment literacy. The third-grade teachers are anxious to better understand the results from the WIDA ACCESS test and how these can be used in tandem with the WIDA Language Charts (WIDA, 2025) in planning units of learning. The group also wants to revisit curricular projects, starting with the weather pattern unit using the WIDA English Language Development Standards Framework, 2020 Edition as its guide. Thus, it ensures that the selected Language Feature and Key Language Use reflect the Language Function specified in the Language Expectation.
The following chart shows the most common purposes for language assessment and their corresponding levels of implementation for multilingual learners.
Purpose for language assessment | Levels of implementation |
|---|---|
Screen for identification and eligibility for language services | State, district |
Contribute to annual accountability of language proficiency | State, district, school, program |
Document student growth in language proficiency | State, district, program, classroom |
Offer daily feedback to students to improve teaching and learning | Classroom |
Principles
The higher the stakes and consequences for multilingual learners, the stronger the assessment claims must be. That means WIDA ACCESS, the annual standardized English language proficiency test, must be highly reliable and valid, while classroom assessment, tied to the daily actions of individual students, can be more flexible and personalized.
As Curie Elementary has a dual language program, it is careful to always consider the students’ multiple languages and cultures as the basis for formulating principles of language assessment, such as the following:
- Students have opportunities to select and use multimodalities — visual, auditory, graphic and kinesthetic supports — to show evidence for learning during instruction and assessment.
- Students have access to their multiple languages and cultures to help document learning during instruction and assessment.
- Students engage in interaction with each other to facilitate their language development during instruction and assessment.
Practices
Curie Elementary’s multilingual learners and its multilingual community are sources of inspiration for the school’s strengths-based education and have sparked changes in classroom assessment. The school’s practices, designed by teacher teams, now reflect language assessment literacy for multilingual learners. For example, the third-grade team, using its unit on weather as an example (see the other WIDA Snapshots on classroom assessment), pledges to achieve the following:
- Connect learning to the learner, instilling pride in accepting the students’ languages, cultures and experiences as the norm (e.g., “I choose the Dominican Republic as a place to record temperatures, as my abuelos still live there and I like to speak Spanish with them.”)
- Cultivate student belonging and ownership in co-creating integrated learning objectives along with agreed upon evidence for learning (e.g., “I can compare the data tables showing differences in temperatures in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. Then, using my data tables, I can explain why the temperatures in the two places are different.”)
- Focus on fostering student choice of modalities (visual, audio, gestural, spatial and linguistic) for meaningful communication and to show evidence for learning (e.g., “I plan to talk to my abuelos and record our conversations on temperature patterns. I’ll make a PowerPoint [presentation] explaining how temperatures differ and I’ll present it to my class.”)
Exploring language assessment literacy has given the third-grade team insight into its purposes, principles and practices as applied to their unit on comparative temperatures. The teachers are excited to share their new learning with other educator teams and use the information from language assessment literacy to further assets-based instruction for their school’s multilingual learners.
References
Butler, Y. G. (2022). Exploring the idea of “assessment with learners” in discussing language assessment literacy. Language Teaching Research Quarterly 29, 92-101.
Castro, M., & Gottlieb, M. (2021, October). Multiliteracies: A glimpse into language arts bilingual classrooms. (WIDA Focus Bulletin). Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
Gottlieb, M. (2023). Right from the start: Enriching learning experiences for multilingual learners through multiliteracies. Center for Applied Linguistics.
WIDA (2020). WIDA English language development standards framework, 2020 edition: Kindergarten–grade 12. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
WIDA (2025). WIDA Interpretive and Expressive Language Charts. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
About WIDA Snapshots
WIDA Snapshots offer short, approachable introductions that help educators put concepts into practice in their work with multilingual learners.