TABE CLAS-E Accommodations

We are a CBO with two family literacy programs.  We use the TABE CLAS-E to report student learning gains for various grants.  Some of our instructors have suggested there may be students with unidentified learning disabilities and have asked about testing accommodations for those students.  I would love to know what other adult ESOL programs provide in terms of testing accommodations.  I’m also interested to know how you determine which students are eligible for accommodations and how the accommodations impact your reporting.  I’d really appreciate any insights anyone has to offer!

Comments

Hi all--and Mrichards--for inquiring about accommodations for the TABE-CLAS-E for ELs. Susan Finn Miller asked me to chime in on this topic, as the issue of learning challenges and adult ELs struggling to learn has been the focus of my professional work for several decades.

Let me start with a few suggestions to think about-- I am more than happy to continue this discussion in subsequent posts, as there is lot to say about learning challenges in ELs!

First, the TABE CLAS-E is, its website says, designed to evaluate a learner's English language proficiency. Therefore, no accommodation would be needed for that purpose. If the student scores so low as to not be able to continue, that is sufficient information to say the student needs much more extensive exposure to English and familiarity with American testing procedures to get a more robust score.

Second, if the student has a very low level of prior literacy, the acquisition of skills--except for basic oral skills-- is likely to be VERY slow. Moreover, the oral skills will necessarily be way ahead of reading and writing skills-- that is the most usual pattern of language acquisition, even for native speakers of a language. If the person is largely illiterate, then acquiring reading and writing skills will be MUCH harder and slower than it is for students with adequate to strong literacy in another language or languages. And if the student is literate but in a script that is not English, transfer of literacy skills--i.e. visual tracking, making sense of sentences, understanding grammar, understanding "deep language"-- will be very challenging for a while. Some of these students catch on quickly; others almost never catch on and are essentially "learning from scratch"--that is, learning to read and write-- negotiate the written code-- all over again.

Third, cultural differences in education systems and values often cause students to do poorly in our classes, where we assume that they will readily adjust to our ways of learning and testing of that learning. The TABE, for example, has "bubble" answer sheets-- a commodity largely unknown in most other cultures. Also, students from many authoritarian cultures expect to be tested on what they have been told to memorize and do not know how to answer "Unformed" questions such as " What do you like about this city?" --which SOUNDS like a simple question, but the student wonders what the RIGHT answer must be.

Fourth, vision and hearing difficulties, as well as other physical difficulties or medications, can interfere significantly with students' abilities to do in-class work and make progress. In an adult ESL class I visited in a large city in my state, 4 students out of 16 --fully one quarter-- had un-revealed visual problems that completely blocked them from being able to do worksheets, bookwork or board work. The teacher had previously asked them about vision difficulties, but in such a way that they did not answer that question. One had lost her glasses, another had vision impairment from being in a war zone, two others simply couldn't see the words on pages at all. But none had admitted or told the teacher about their difficulties. This, again, can be a culturally conditioned response, since in many countries, students with impairments of any kind are regularly excluded from classes. I know this for a fact....

Fifth, if learning goals are not clearly laid out for students, especially low level ones, they may not know they are supposed to master whatever lessons are being presented. This again is a cultural issue, related as above, to the issue of thinking that learning means memorizing, and if the teacher has not asked for that, then the content is nice, but not necessary-- in their minds. And since it is, in most adult ELs' minds, the job of the TEACHER to tell them what they need to learn, if you ASK them what their learning goals are, they will either not know how to tell you, or think you are pretty dumb for asking that. I think of a group of East African students I encountered a few years ago-- the director of their program was so frustrated that he could not get these students to write anything, when he knew they COULD write. I asked what prompts he was giving them, and the said, "simple questions, like 'Why do you want to learn English?'" Knowing from working with other students of the same background that they would not answer questions they felt were stupid or that the teacher already knew the answer to, I asked what these students had answered to that question.... The director said they wrote a couple of sentences or phrases such as "so I can get a good job" or "so I can go to college and get an education so I can help my village back home."Some even refused to answer that question.   I suggested he ask them more opinion- based questions, such as "Who is your favorite soccer team and why?" He wrote back some days later expressing total amazement at the students' responses-- ALL had written a LOT; some had written pages and pages!!!

There is MUCH to say on the educational and cultural issues involved in poor progress; that said, sometimes-- RARELY -- there ARE learning difficulties. A tutor in the Boston area had a student who was not making any meaningful progress in learning to read English, despite high literacy in his first language. I asked her if he could rhyme or hear rhyme in English-- I had just taught a group she was in that according to my deep training in teaching reading to reading disabled students (English speaking), if one does not hear and produce rhymes in English, reading will be difficult. That tutor, who insisted her student must be able to rhyme, came back to our group and reported that, in fact, he could NOT rhyme in English. Some intensive work on that helped him do so, and his reading finally progressed. As mentioned earlier, sometimes there ARE visual impairments or damage that cause learning from written materials to be almost impossible. Students with significant hearing loss have VERY great difficulty doing traditional phonics and profiting from instruction. Their speaking and spelling may reflect that difficulty. But students are VERY reluctant to reveal such problems, mostly because of what I mentioned earlier-- that they will be ejected from class for having an impairment.

So, think about these things and please do get back to us with more information on why your teachers might feel there are learning difficulties-- remember, please, that the term "learning disabilities" is a LEGAL term and cannot be used without a diagnosis. One other aspect to my work is repeating often that it is pretty much impossible, legally and practically, to diagnose LD in ELs, because of a LONG list of problems using current tools and methods for such a diagnosis.

Thank you for reading this-- and I hope it is thought provoking to you and others. I look forward to more discussion on this issue. I know for a fact that many readers of this list have been in many of my workshops. I hope they chime in on this topic! Perhaps Susan will be so kind as to post links to articles I have written in the past on this topic.

Robin Lovrien, PhD, MSpEd: LD, Independent Consultant in Adult EL and Adult Education.

Thank you kindly for sharing your expertise and your wisdom with us, Robin. You've given Megan and the rest of us a lot to think about regarding the complex issue of learning issues and testing for adult English learners.

Some members will be interested to read Robin and Martha Bigelow's piece, which was reviewed for the LINCS collection, Adult English Language Learners with Limited Literacy. Another of Robin's valuable articles, "Taking a Closer Look at Struggling ESOL Learners," was published in Focus on Basics.

And here's a link to a previous LINCS discussion on this issue where Robin was our guest: Helping Adult English Language Learners Who Have Learning Challenges.

In addition, Robin was the author of the section of the LINCS Learning to Achieve online course focused on adult English learners.

  • "Learning to Achieve: English Language Learners (1 hour)  In this self-paced module, participants identify testing and instructional accommodation considerations for individuals with learning disabilities."

Thanks for posting your question, Megan. Members, you are all invited to continue digging into this important topic.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP

Thank you, Susan, for posting the links and info on my writings, etc.  For those of you reading, if you possibly can, find the ORIGINAL publication of Learning to Achieve (2010), in which I wrote Chapter 3.  That chapter gives a LOT of information about what interferes with testing ELs for LD, as well as a lot of information on why learners DO struggle in our classes.   Much that information was not able to be included in the online video course.     

Robin Lovrien, PhD, MSpEd:LD, Independent Consultant in Adult ESL/Education 

Thanks for mentioning the report Learning to Achieve, Robin. I'm certain members will be interested in reading your important contribution in Chapter 3: "Issues in Identifying Learning Disabilities for English Language Learners."

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP