ERIC Number: EJ1023656
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013
Pages: 28
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0950-0782
EISSN: N/A
Accuracy of Teachers' Predictions of Language Minority and Majority Students' Language Comprehension
Wold, Astri Heen
Language and Education, v27 n6 p498-525 2013
The classroom is an important context of second language learning for language minority children. Teachers are responsible for creating good learning opportunities by securing language use well adjusted to the children's level of comprehension. Thus, teachers should have realistic expectations of this. The purpose of the research is to increase knowledge of the classroom as a language learning setting by exploring the accuracy of teachers' evaluations of their students' language comprehension and possible biases in their evaluations of language minority compared to majority students. A total of 205 students from 13 different classes and their main teachers from five different schools in Norway participated in the research. The students were tested for vocabulary and grammatical comprehension of Norwegian, and their teachers were asked to predict how each child would score on each test item. The language minority children gained lower scores than the majority children, a difference also predicted by their teachers. The accuracy of teachers' predictions was higher for language majority than minority children, however. This difference seems to be directly affected by the language minority/majority status of the child. The teachers were, furthermore, most accurate when predicting the comprehension scores of the students they believed to be high performers.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Second Language Learning, Minority Group Students, Norwegian, Language Usage, Student Evaluation, Teacher Attitudes, Accuracy, Vocabulary Development, Grammar, Language Tests, Prediction, Scores, Test Items, Elementary School Students, Elementary School Teachers, Listening Comprehension, Correlation, Self Concept, Social Theories
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Publication Type: Reports - Research; Journal Articles
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Norway
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A