Any advice on current EAL Assessment
rashdasalamat786
stuart scott
The NASSEA steps are proving very useful in Primary and EYFS settings.
However there is still a way to go to acquire complete integration into most Information tracking systems.
Currently most people I talk to using NASSEA, use the NASSEA descriptors for tracking NTE or slow to fluency children, and add this into contextual information to set against the dreaded below age expectation tag. Then hope you get the chance to talk to an OFSTED inspector when they come.
In schools where the EAL staff have capacity, all EAL children have a NASSEA step and this is communicated to class teachers to inform planning.
In some settings, teachers work with EAL staff to use NASSEA for all pupils as well as the age related descriptors, and have data systems that enable these to be recorded, analysed and used to inform practice.
This is a gold standard way of meeting need requiring an enlightened head and SLT, a flexible data management system, committed staff and probably not being in an RI or inadequate school.
For current secondary practice you would have to ask someone else.
Ann Horton
From: stuart scott <stuart...@collaborativelearning.org>
To: EAL-Bilingual <eal-bi...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 6, 2016 11:19 AM
Subject: [EAL-Bilingual;4703] Re: Any advice on current EAL Assessment
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Helen Rowe
On Thursday, February 4, 2016 at 9:04:03 PM UTC, rashdasalamat786 wrote:
Ann Horton
- ENG – English
- ENB – Believed to be English
- A - New to English
- B - Early Acquisition
- C - Developing Competence
- D - Competent
- E - Fluent
- 0 - Not Applicable”
From: Helen Rowe <helenr...@gmail.com>
To: EAL-Bilingual <eal-bi...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2016 5:41 PM
Subject: [EAL-Bilingual;4712] Re: Any advice on current EAL Assessment
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Graham Smith
Jonathan Brentnall
Ann
I hadn’t heard this but these are the EAL Stages we’ve had in Wales for several years, which were agreed with Capita to be built into SIMS software releases for schools in Wales. They have been used to assess levels of proficiency for the PLASC and matched with attainment data (with varying degrees of success/usefulness for a number of reasons). I suspect DfE and Capita have been having internal conversations and have found that, as they’ve already got those ‘Stages’ in their system, they could easily incorporate them into releases for schools in England.
Knowing that most of the EAL Assessments being developed in England recently are trying to align themselves with the CEFR which has 6 stages (plus you’d need a 7th category for ‘not EAL’), you might want to raise objections. Otherwise, all schools will be expected to use these.
In previous comments about this topic I have mentioned the ‘need’ for an agreed set of stages for England to help improve the quality of data you can get about proficiency in English, avoiding the simple binary EAL/not EAL distinction that’s provided little useful data, but I firmly believe that decision should be made with consultation, democratically decided, not imposed without consultation.
However, if DfE has already decided on this and, in typical fashion, does not open it up for modification, this could provide the opportunity to resolve the other suggestion I put out there about having two: One to keep Stuart’s ‘pig-weighers’ happy (the DfE one, consistent across all schools), and another one that’s more detailed, useful and relevant to the business of formative EAL assessment (which could be NASSEA, Solihull, a combination or something else – whatever each group of professionals feel is best for their situation).
Jonathan
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ladyjessica44
Diane Leedham
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K Horne
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Ann Horton
From: Jonathan Brentnall <jonbre...@btinternet.com>
To: 'Ann Horton' <aehor...@yahoo.com>; 'Helen Rowe' <helenr...@gmail.com>
Cc: eal-bi...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2016 9:24 PM
Subject: RE: [EAL-Bilingual;4715] Re: Any advice on current EAL Assessment
Jonathan Brentnall
Colleagues
Advance apologies for another lengthy email on assessment but the reason this topic has been unresolved for so long is because the devil lies in the detail. My comments below pick up on some points made by others, pose some questions for Scottish colleagues and offer a few suggestions of my own about the DfE development, from our experience in Wales (see also the pre-Christmas thread on ‘EAL Assessment’ which relates to this).
1) I’m not sure year of entry is such a good indicator of proficiency. You could have two children of the same age, entering school at the same time, one who is fluent and literate in L1, well-educated abroad, taught English as a foreign language or curriculum subject, and the other with disrupted formal education, little or no L1 literacy and no English. Their respective levels of proficiency on arrival, and their progress through time, would differ markedly from one another. One of the purposes of the general stages of EAL (from Hester onwards) has been to evaluate amount and nature of support needed and I don’t think year of entry would give you that.
2) All EAL ‘stages’ and assessment progression schemes are ‘made up’. The assessment descriptor statements are selective and often generalised and because additional language development happens along a broad, and sometimes erratic, continuum, the boundaries between whatever stages or levels chosen are fairly arbitrary.
What matters is: the purposes they are used for and whether or not they fulfil those purposes.
3) I have two major concerns about what happens next:
a) If the DfE has a full and wide-ranging consultation or at least involves professionals with expertise in this field in a discussion about the adoption of a national ‘scale’, it could spark in-fighting and lead to acrimony about how many levels, how each will be elaborated and which of the currently available schemes are best. I know that many people have invested such a lot of time and effort into developing local and regional schemes that I fear few would be willing to give them up for something else (in the near future at least).
b) If the DfE does not consult and just includes it through SIMS, there could be very variable take up (with great scepticism from some such as happened with the QCA Steps and Language in Common) or, if compulsory, lack of moderation and other factors will result in the kind of puzzling and unhelpful outcome data we’ve found in Wales (See my article in NALDIC Quarterly Vol 15, No.2, 2015, p19-28 espec. p24 onwards).
4) I’d be really interested to hear from Scottish colleagues about how their 5 Stage model of competence functions: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/inclusionandequalities/additionalsupportforlearning/eal/resources.asp
· How effective is it in fulfilling the range of assessment purposes?
· How well do the 5 stages match the more detailed statements – is there professional agreement?
· How accurately does the scale of EAL competence match development in curriculum learning?
· How accurately do you think curriculum attainment data reflect stage of EAL competence?
5) K’s concern about being ‘judged’ is a significant one, so discussion does need to be had with DfE about how the EAL data will be used (its limited purposes must be clearly defined) and it shouldn’t be used to measure ‘progress’ as the 5 (effectively 4) stages of progression span such a broad expanse of language development (especially C-E), they tell you very little.
6) Graham is right about moderation of any EAL scale. There is a need for some elaboration on what each ‘DfE Stage’ refers to and teachers need to be given information and training on what pupils functioning at a particular Stage will ‘look like’, but whether this is quite simple and general like the attached file for the Wales stages (or its slightly elaborated version, divided into three skills groups here: https://eal.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/document-files/5_Stage_ModelWales-2015.pdf), or more detailed like the Scottish descriptors, relates to my 3a) concern above, which we want to avoid.
Personally, I don’t think it’s worth busy professionals wasting time arguing about the details, because such a brief, generalised, best-fit scale is very limited. It can only fulfil a small number of purposes so, if it is imposed, I’d keep any elaboration broad and simple so there is plenty of room for reinterpretation of different kinds of ‘detail’ from whatever more useful assessment schemes you use at local levels.
I understand ‘real assessment’, which K refers to, as something much more specific to incremental progress in integrated language and curriculum learning, and more helpful for planning and day-to-day support. For this you do need something much more detailed and curriculum-linked. However, I’d caution that ‘national’ curriculum assessment and EAL development do not match up neatly either. We encountered this problem when trying to dovetail P-Scales and QCA Steps etc. into the NC Levels. EAL learners are too diverse to be assessed accurately against normative E1L, age-based assessment scales, e.g. a pupil may be far from proficient as an EAL learner but be able to perform well in maths, science or DT topic areas, for example, where diagrams, pictures, practicals, minimal linguistic response answers and multi-choice questions aim to test knowledge and understanding more than proficiency in extended academic English. So in some circumstances curriculum performance exceeds ‘age-normed’ level of English proficiency and masks some language development needs, especially of more advanced learners. A blend is needed.
7) You could spend time trying to match up whatever detailed scheme you use with the 5 broad stages (i.e. try and squeeze the Solihull, NASSEA or other set of levels into 5), so you could give the appearance of having a correlated evidence base for your best-fit judgments but, in my view, it’s not necessary – the boundary lines would be just as arbitrary – and it wouldn’t overcome inconsistency across the nation as different people use different schemes with different criteria and different matches. The edges would always be fuzzy.
8) I may be wrong, and I know it’s far from ideal, but if this DfE/SIMS development goes ahead without further consultation, FOR NOW, my advice would still be to keep your assessment schemes separate (as Ann mentioned she is doing) and clearly define the different purposes they fulfil:
· best-fit general DfE 5 stages for initial description of pupils, for immediate allocation of support, and for national data collection (which, though flawed, will at least give you some evidence that not all EAL pupils ‘outperform’ their E1L peers, as the media have been implying based on the current binary system, and will give us something nationally consistent)
· local/regional EAL assessment schemes for the business of more meaningful formative evaluation, planning and assessment of gradual progression.
There will be flaws, whichever way this turns out, and I hope that a consensus may arise in a couple of years about a single coherent national scheme, but I’m not sure we’re there yet.
Sadly, it has been a failure of our profession over the past three decades that we have not done something better ourselves before now.
Optimistically?
Jonathan
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