Title: Equity for English-Language Learners | Edutopia
Headings: Equity for English-Language Learners
Education Equity
Equity for English-Language Learners
By Rusul Alrubail
July 7, 2016
Ensuring Fair Assessment
Providing Students With Quality Instruction and Resources
Equitable Accommodations
Allow students to use a dictionary and/or thesaurus.
Give students extra time.
Provide an alternate method of teaching and learning.
Allow translations.

Content: Consequently, equitable practices both in and out of the classroom must be implemented to ensure that English-language learners get a fair opportunity not only at learning, but also at excelling in learning. Ensuring Fair Assessment
With all of the standards and testing that teachers have to conduct in the classroom, it's important that we ensure a fair assessment for ELLs. When we assess this population, we must remember to separate language skills from content skills. Some of these language skills include vocabulary, comprehension, phonology, grammar (syntax), and meaning (semantics). Content assessment focuses on whether or not the student was able to grasp the subject matter. Duverger (2005) suggests that "another way of disentangling the effects of language proficiency on content proficiency is to have a double scale of criteria: criteria relating to the content being delivered and criteria relating to the language being used." This is a helpful strategy as it allows the teacher to create some sort of scale or rubric to easily identify the language skills during and after assessment. Providing Students With Quality Instruction and Resources
To many ELLs, the learning opportunity that they receive is different than their native-speaker counterparts. Research suggests that effective English-language learning classrooms foster a strong environment of collaboration, dialogue, and group engagement.