The pedagogical practice of test accommodations with emergent bilinguals: Policy-enforced washback in two urban schools

This dissertation is a comparative ethnographic case study of the policy-enforced washback of test accommodations for emergent bilingual students in two urban Northeast public schools in Pennsylvania. It draws on six months of participant observation field notes, recorded and unrecorded interviews, and a collection of classroom artifacts to investigate how test accommodations are initiated, responded to, and evaluated in practice-standardized testing, classroom assessment, and classroom instruction situations. Drawing from the fields of language planning and policy, critical language testing, and classroom discourse analysis, I focus on the ideologies of accommodations by conceptualizing accommodations as ideological and implementational restricted and negotiated spaces where federal and state policies interact with actions by and decisions of administrators, teachers, and students. I examine how policies and limited resources restrict implementational spaces and how agentive decisions and actions by administrators, teachers, and students are often mitigated by ideological spaces. The actions of these individuals index how they not only followed, but also challenged institutional and ideological pressures to measure student achievement with instruments that were designed using monolingual standards. This research introduces the concept of policy-enforced washback to capture phenomena resulting from a policy that mandates parallel use of accommodations from standardized testing in classroom instruction. I contextualize the study within a history of testing and accommodations for emergent bilinguals in the United States that shows a pattern of conflating, misrepresenting, and overlooking the needs of emergent bilinguals and I question the legality of current measures used for emergent bilinguals. This study\u27s practice-based approach argues for a shift from the view of accommodation as a tool that levels the playing field through assimilation to monolingual norms to one that introduces multilingual scaffolds to support and promote the multilingual competencies of all students. I conclude by discussing how changes can be made to make this shift a reality by including multilingual competencies within content standards