Teaching ESL students is an important aspect of modern education in the United States. To do so properly requires careful consideration of a variety of factors. To explain how a teacher may approach ESL students in an effective manner, Smith, Teemant, and Pinnegar (2004) assembled a list of concepts, practices and checklist items which should be used in the majority of assessment evaluation cases. This paper will examine two of the checklist items, as well as their importance to ESL education as a whole.
Feedback
Feedback is an essential tool not only in education but in the world at large. The function of feedback is to deliver information about the effectiveness of a given object, service or method to those who created it. The presented article examines feedback as a checklist item that should indicate whether the students gain a proper idea of the quality of their work. Proper evaluation assessment should provide timely and constructive feedback to the students, and the scores should reflect the evaluation. Feedback is important for a variety of reasons. The first is in presenting students with an evaluation of their achievements. It allows them to examine which elements of the curriculum require further attention and subsequently improve on them through additional studying and practice.
Ideally, every error is clearly marked, and recommendations are given by the teacher on how the student may improve in the future. Feedback should also be encouraging in nature, studying requires additional efforts on the part of ESL students, and if the feedback is completely negative in nature, it may serve as a deterrent to further studies. Students should understand that despite the errors they made, they are still capable of improving their abilities. Moreover, other students are just as capable of making mistakes so ESL students should not be discouraged by an initial low grade or wrong answer (Wang, 2014; Ene & Kosobucki, 2016).
Feedback is just as important to the teacher. It allows them to see patterns in the errors that students make and adjust the curriculum to improve their knowledge as well as prevent these mistakes in the future. While a single paper would not provide enough information about how well the class is retaining the information but an analysis of the full class can be invaluable for the teacher. Therefore, whenever multiple students show similar errors on their tests, it should be a sign for the teacher that this topic was not retained by the students.
Fairness
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of ESL education is fairness. Bias can be extremely harmful to students even when it is positive. Assessments should be unbiased in nature and provide all the students with equitable evaluations. However, this does not mean that students should be denied assistance to reach the desired educational goals. Teachers are encouraged to assist each student in improving their understanding of the subject to ensure that all students gain the same understanding of the curriculum during the process of education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016).
Equal opportunities in education are as important as equal opportunities in employment because the former is often required for the latter to be true. The effectiveness of this approach to education has been examined in a multitude of studies. In the majority of cases, classes that assisted ESL students showed higher retention rates than those that did not, as well as higher quality of results. People are inherently unique, and even representatives of the same culture may hold completely different views and have different needs in understanding the presented topics. To meet these needs, teachers should become familiar with each student and their families if it is possible. Having a better understanding of the students should allow them to create more accurate and effective assessments of them (Scott, Webber, Lupart, Aitken, & Scott, 2014).
Conclusion
Feedback and fairness are two of the most important items in the checklist presented by the authors. They represent not only essential concepts of education, but also provide a number of benefits to both students and teachers. Feedback makes it possible for everyone to improve their abilities and show results of their work. Understanding of said feedback may also be useful outside of school as most businesses use feedback as an important evaluation and iteration tool. Fairness is equally important because it allows every student to receive the same education without issue. Its effects are also applicable outside of the classroom as education is required for most professions.
References
Cochran-Smith, M., Ell, F., Grudnoff, L., Haigh, M., Hill, M., & Ludlow, L. (2016). Initial teacher education: What does it take to put equity at the center? Teaching and Teacher Education, 57, 67–78.
Ene, E., & Kosobucki, V. (2016). Rubrics and corrective feedback in ESL writing: A longitudinal case study of an L2 writer. Assessing Writing, 30, 3–20.
Scott, S., Webber, C. F., Lupart, J. L., Aitken, N., & Scott, D. E. (2014). Fair and equitable assessment practices for all students. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 21(1), 52–70.
Smith, M. E., Teemant, A., & Pinnegar, S. (2004). Principles and practices of sociocultural assessment: Foundations for effective strategies for linguistically diverse classrooms. Multicultural Perspectives, 6(2), 38–46.
Wang, W. (2014). Students’ perceptions of rubric-referenced peer feedback on EFL writing: A longitudinal inquiry. Assessing Writing, 19, 80–96.