The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 required schools to hire "highly qualified" teachers, which works out to mean that grade school ESL teachers need to have the same educational and experience qualifications as medical doctors . Doctors can diagnose, yet, for some reason, State and local level administrators can't allow teachers to be the judges of their students' progress. The only data acceptable to the State are from the State's standardized tests. Why not allow teachers to submit data from formative classroom assessments? I think the Home Language Questionnaire and initial exams to determine student language stages are important, especially when use in conjunction with oral examination and interviews by highly qualified ESL teachers. However, after that the judgment of an ELL's language performance becomes more subtle and subjective. How a student is progressing in learning language is best judged by the teache...
Resources for ESL Teachers