Teachers’ Stories about Home Language Surveys
Improving ESL Screening for Multilingual Learners
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/slte.23818Keywords:
home language survey, English as a second language, families, self-study of teacher education practices, language teacher educationAbstract
U.S. schools use home language surveys (HLS) as initial screening tools to determine whether students should be screened for ESL services. These placement decisions have potentially long-lasting implications for multilingual students. In this Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) project, we explored how teachers talk about HLS across seven academic years of the first author’s ESL assessment course, and how they made sense of families’ decisions to hide home languages on the HLS. We analyzed teachers’ stories when discussing a news article about families who provided misinformation on HLS, so their children would not be screened for ESL. Our question is: How do teachers use their experiences to understand families’ decisions about providing misinformation on HLS? These stories illuminated how teachers made sense of the HLS experiences of families in the news article, and how teachers identified problems with HLS. Teachers’ stories included sharing about people they knew or about they themselves, as parents, completing HLS; about what happened after families submitted HLS; and about why families would provide misinformation, including past difficult experiences in ESL themselves and fears of stigma or tracking. Based on these stories, we consider implications for those who might change HLS, teachers, teacher educators, and researchers.
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