Assessing English Learners’ Language Proficiency: A Qualitative Investigation of Teachers’ Interpretations of the California ELD Standards

This study investigates teachers’ use of the English Language Development (ELD) Classroom Assessment, an assessment of English proficiency used in a large urban school district in California. This classroom assessment, which consists of a checklist of the California ELD standards, is used to make high-stakes decisions about students’ progress from one ELD level to the next and serves as one criterion for reclassification. Ten elementary school teachers were interviewed and asked to produce verbal protocols while scoring the ELD Classroom Assessment of two of their students. Through six examples from the data, this paper shows that teachers do not interpret the ELD standards consistently and as a result the scores they assign on the ELD Classroom Assessment to different students have different meanings. The paper concludes by discussing several factors that might affect how teachers interpret standards and the implications of these findings for the use of standardsbased classroom assessments within a high-stakes accountability system.