Teacher Views on the Implementation of English Language Proficiency Scales for Young Indigenous Learners of Standard English

Young Indigenous students with a language background of emergent, unrecognised, and/or non-prestigious contact languages are commonly by-passed as English language learners (ELLs). Consequently, they are taught and assessed via undifferentiated mainstream pedagogy and testing, generally characterised by reported underachievement. Long-term social and linguistic minoritisation has effectively created this inequitable situation, excluding this cohort from standard school ELL processes such as on-entry identification, and specialist ELL services of assessment and needs-based support. In these challenging social-educational contexts, where, furthermore, knowledge about the varieties resulting from language contact and shift is still developing, initiating language assessment for these young Language Minority ELLs pivots on the discernment of non-specialist classroom teachers. This is clearly a high stakes assessment exercise for this otherwise invisible ELL cohort, as this evidence makes the case for language-informed responses, such as differentiated delivery of classroom curriculum. Prioritising the social context in language assessment use and drawing on exploratory practice principles, the study investigates teachers’ views on their use of the state mandated classroom-based proficiency tool (adapted to be inclusive of this Indigenous ELL sub-group). This serves to illuminate the kind of support teachers need to conduct identification and assessment for these Indigenous ELLs and to highlight the broad gaps in basic research. An analysis of the interviews elicits the “puzzles” facing classroom teachers. Findings include that direct elucidation of tool puzzles for L2 pathways in contact language contexts would be most useful, not a proliferation of extra tools nor a complexification of the current tool.