Confounded and Compounded by Language: English Language Learners and High Stakes Testing

Authors

Elizabeth ParkFollow

Abstract

As her students prepare to take their tests to exhibit English proficiency, the atmosphere, writes Park, "becomes military at best, prison-like at worst. Regulations are distributed. Teachers are warned that state examiners may appear unannounced to look for infractions of the myriad rules..." Scare tactics are used to try to assure that the testing activity remains uncontaminated by human desire, fear, or simple boredom.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Park is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Penn State University, where she is investigating ways to create open teaching and learning spaces for English Language Learners and their teachers. She taught ESL in a public middle school for ten years and has also taught methodology and linguistics courses at several colleges and universities. A graduate of Bank Street College, she has been an American Memory Fellow at the Library of Congress and was awarded a Dodge Foundation grant to support field work for her thesis in second language acquisition.

Recommended Citation

Park, E. (2009). Confounded and Compounded by Language: English Language Learners and High Stakes Testing. Occasional Paper Series, (22). DOI: https://doi.org/10.58295/2375-3668.1142