Practical Ideas on Alternative Assessment for ESL Students. Many educators have come to recognize that alternative assessments are an important means of gaining a dynamic picture of students' academic and linguistic development. It is particularly useful with English as a second language students because it employs strategies that ask students to show what they can do. Consideration is given to the learning styles, language proficiencies, cultural and educational backgrounds, and grade levels of students.
Alternative assessment includes a variety of measures that can be adapted for different situations.
This Digest provides examples of measures that are well suited for assessing ESL students. To express academic concepts without speech, students can point or use other gestures. They can also be asked to perform hands-on tasks or to act out vocabulary, concepts, or events. The teacher can use a checklist to record student responses over time. To elicit content knowledge without requiring students to speak or write, teachers can ask students to produce and manipulate drawings, dioramas, models, graphs, and charts.