Teacher expectations of multilingual students’ achievement

Assessment is a powerful tool for both teachers and students to get more insight into students’ competences. However, multilingual learners may be underperforming on tests because linguistic barriers hinder them in demonstrating their content knowledge. In this study, we investigate whether multilingual assessment holds the potential to adjust erroneous teacher expectations of multilingual students. We discuss a randomised experiment in which 1,154 students in 5th grade (age 9 to 12) were randomly assigned to one of four test conditions: (1) a bilingual test, (2) a bilingual test with additional read-aloud accommodation in both the language of schooling and home language, (3) read-aloud accommodation in the language of schooling and (4) a control condition without accommodations. Flemish teachers were asked how well they expected their students to perform on a science test. By using chi-square tests, we examine the accuracy of teacher expectations and investigate whether this differs according to students’ linguistic backgrounds and test accommodations. The results suggest that when multilingual students use read-aloud accommodations in their L1, they more often tend to do better than expected by their teachers. Implications for testing culture, test accommodations and teacher expectations are discussed.