Prompt #3 and Shor

As teachers, when we design instruments to evaluate our assessments, or tests, we must be sensitive to the individual needs and backgrounds of our students. We must, ultimately, be responsive to the linguistic, ethnic and sociocultural characteristics of the students that fill our classroom. Perhaps the characteristic which we must pay the most attention to, the one that is of the greatest importance would be the linguistics of our students.


To begin, it is possible that because of a student’s ethnic or sociocultural characteristics, their linguistic uniqueness has been affected or is different from those of the teacher. For example, this is easily seen with English as second language students. Because understanding English would already come as a challenge, it is more than likely that an ESL student would have an increased amount of difficulty compared to a fellow English speaking student because he/she does not speak English as a primary language, and depending on the age and or background, may not really even understand English all that well. If a student who speaks English as a second language struggles with the language as it is, how well will they grasp the instructions on an assessment? And in turn, how well will they perform on that assessment if they don’t have a profound hold on what is even expected of them? The answer is, probably not well- it seems to be a vicious cycle for these students which is why as teachers we must be aware of this situation and do our job as efficient educators to provide the best possible opportunities for these students by creating alterations, etc. adjusted to the individual student’s needs based on these characteristics which will, in time, result in better and more proficient test scores.

This concept relates to the ideas of theorist Ira Shor and his article “Problem Posing: Situated and Multicultural Learning”. Shor believes that “student speech, community life and perceptions are foundations of the curriculum”, and although his articles focuses mainly on the participation and involvement of students, he does seem to weigh heavily the background of the students and how that effects each classroom, in turn affecting how participatory a classroom is apt to be. Shor goes on to talk about how it must be for a student who knows another language better and is more comfortable with, than what has come to be known as the “superior language”. He says, “Imagine no matter how hard you try to master the “superior” language, elements of your own language keep creeping in”. This automatically made me picture a student, sitting at their desk with a state assessment in front of them, and not knowing how to even start because due to the language they know best, and the fact that it is not English, they are lost. They look around the classroom and see all the other students writing and reading and doing what they are suppose to do, but then they look down and they feel just an overwhelming sense of helplessness because they have been thrown into an education system that does not acknowledge his/her individual needs, and would rather just recognize them as the score on that state test that lies in front of them.