experienced assessment solely in the form of grades and annual assessments. If
teachers are to be able to make sound decisions from assessment information,
shaping pre-service teachers’ understanding of the varied types and uses of
assessments within the system will need to be a goal of teacher education programs.
One of the consequences of both a long-term emphasis on accountability
assessments and a lack of attention to teachers’assessment literacy is that the
practice of formative assessment (in other countries often referred to as assessment
for learning) remains underdeveloped among U.S. teachers. Research and theory on
formative assessment point to the benefits of this practice for student learning (e.g.,
Black and Wiliam 1998 ) and in some countries, such as a number of jurisdictions in
Canada, there are well-developed frameworks of assessment for learning from
which other educational systems might benefit. Teachers graduating from teacher
education programs in the U.S. are largely underprepared to engage in formative
assessment in support of ongoing learning. This situation is further exacerbated for
teachers of ELL students, who must attend to both content and language learning.
The absence of language and content progressions noted earlier, combined with a
lack of training in how to gather and interpret evidence of language and content
learning day-by-day, results in newly qualified teachers entering the profession
without core knowledge and skills to support their ELL students’ongoing learning.
47.5 A Way Forward
Given the paucity of support for mainstream U.S. teachers of ELL students, and the
pressing need for improvement in teacher education programs in the areas discussed
above, in the next section we consider some possible ways forward. Wefirst report
on a study of sixth-grade teachers that focuses on their explanations, a high-use
pedagogical function for achieving new standards, of the key principles underlying
mastery in Algebra I (Bailey et al. 2011 ). We then describe how, in a subsequent
study, teachers’ formative assessment and their resulting instructional
decision-making can be assisted by an empirically derived learning progression of
students’mathematical explanations. Both studies contribute to our understanding of
teachers’language knowledge and use, and have the potential to lead to innovative
ways to address professional preparation for teachers’work with ELL students.
47.5.1 Clarity in Teacher Explanations
If teachers are to communicate clearly with their students, they must know how to
structure their own speech for maximum clarity. However, our understanding of the
language that teachers use in teaching needs to extend beyond emphasis on single
words and proper grammatical usage to also include a more complex view of the
language associated with subject-matter teaching.
704 A.L. Bailey and M. Heritage