Pre-instructional Student Assessment

Abstract

Pre-instructional assessment is essential to teach EFL/ESL students effectively. Several studies have shown the importance of pre-instructional assessment; however, most of them focus on the pre-assessment of the cognitive and academic areas only. In doing so, two aspects that have an important impact on students’ performance have been left out: the sociocultural and the linguistic. The following study, conducted with ESL students of a Pull-Out program of a public elementary school in United States, collected information about students’ sociocultural, academic, linguistic, and cognitive backgrounds through two informal and non-traditional pre-assessment tools: Biography Cards, and Linking Language. The objective was to explore how the information obtained could contribute to understand the challenges students were facing, to make informed decisions about planning and instruction, and to accommodate and better support ESL/EFL learners who come from diverse sociocultural, linguistic, academic, and cognitive backgrounds. The pre-assessment tools used in this study let us obtain important information such as students’ culture, L1 (first language), prior schooling, prior academic experiences, parental academic support, preferred grouping, and preferred information processing, which helped identify strategies that adapt to their needs and facilitate their learning. The results suggest the following strategies are very effective with these students: connect the content of the lesson to the cultural background of students, use a lot of visuals and hands-on activities, provide L1 support during class instruction, and use guarded vocabulary (list of terms that may cause problems for students). This indicates that before planning instruction, it is necessary to know our students’ academic, linguistic, sociocultural, and cognitive background in order to teach ESL/EFL students effectively.