Date: Monday June 17, 2024 5:00-6:00pm UK Local time. Please check the world clock here for your time.

Title: Equitable Assessments for Multilingual Learners: Integrating Socioculturally Responsive and Personalized Assessment Approaches

Speakers: Lorraine Sova, Mikyung Kim Wolf and Emilie Pooler

The presentation:

Primary and secondary schools are increasingly “superdiverse” in the U.S. and globally (Park et al., 2018; Vertovec, 2023). Students—including multilingual learners—have unique social, cultural, and educational characteristics that, instead of being discounted, might be leveraged in instruction and assessment as a means of advancing equity in education. To better assess and support the reading and literacy development of multilingual learners, we employed socioculturally responsive and personalized assessment approaches in developing a classroom assessment for formative use. In this webinar, we will demonstrate the features of our assessment design and share research findings from a usability study.

The speakers:

Lorraine Sova has a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, is a certified English as a Second Language and elementary education teacher, and has taught English as a Foreign Language to children and adults. Since 2011, Lorraine has been a test developer at Educational Testing Service, developing English language proficiency assessments for young learners and adults as well as teaching and learning content for English language educators and their students.

Mikyung Kim Wolf is a Principal Research Scientist in the Center for Language Education and Assessment Research (CLEAR) at ETS. Mikyung has over 20 years of experience in developing and researching language assessments for multilingual learners. She has published numerous articles and edited two book, Assessing English Language Proficiency in U.S. K-12 Schools (2020, Routledge) and English Language Proficiency Assessment for Young Learners (2017, Routledge).  

Emilie Pooler has over 20 years of experience as assessment developer for English language proficiency assessments at Education Testing Service (ETS). She has been the content lead for a number of projects at ETS and has led the development of a range of innovative task types for students in K-12 schools as well as in higher education settings. Emilie earned her Ed.M. in international education from Harvard University and her bachelor’s degree in English from Colgate University.

IATEFL Event page: https://www.iatefl.org/events/513

Zoom registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_thxJTyOISjWvmGm39jPTeQ#/registration

Certificates will be issued only to IATEFL members who attended the live webinar. They will receive details directly from IATEFL shortly after the event.

Recording: The recording of the webinar will be available only to TEASIG members in the members’ area (“My resources”) of the IATEFL website. 

You can contact us any time via email at [email protected] . We are looking forward to meeting you online soon!

Best regards,

Anna Soltyska & Reshmi Murali, TEASIG Joint Webinar Moderators