Preparing ESL-friendly tests and worksheets

Be aware of the difficulties of academic vocabulary .

Academic vocabulary is the term for non-subject-specific vocabulary that occurs across all disciplines: e.g. duration, eventually, similarity, furthermore, rate, etc.

ESL students often fail to comprehend tasks fully because they don't know the meanings of such words. If a worksheet contains academic words that are critical to an understanding of the main idea or task, it would be helpful to explain their meanings in advance.

Read more on academic vocabulary.

Be aware of the difficulty of idioms and phrasal verbs

Such expressions are often impenetrable to non-native speakers, who may know the meanings of the individual words but who are not familiar with the overall sense. For example, the following (apocryphal) extracts from history examinations would certainly not be immediately comprehensible to most ESL students.

- Explain how Grant was able to wipe the floor with Lee at the battle of Antietam?

- Why did Britain blow hot and cold for so long on the invitation to join the Common Market?

Read more on idioms and phrasal verbs.

Avoid complex syntax in question prompts.

@@ Use simple sentences and separate out the actual task from the illustrative detail. ~~ For example, the second of these prompts is probably more readily understood than the first:

- Explain why metals expand when they get warmer and contract when they get cooler, whereas water does the opposite.

- Metals expand when they get warmer and contract when they get cooler. Water does the opposite. Explain why.

Be aware of the potential difficulty of negatives.

Research† has shown that negative sentences can be harder or slower to process than positive ones. So the first of the following questions may slow down the reader (or even impede understanding) more than the second one, its equivalent:

- Why didn't America enter World War 1 until 1917?

- Why did America wait until 1917 before entering World War 1?

Take care with punctuation.

Generally, it is better to over- rather than under-punctuate, even though this goes against the current trend in (British) English style. Inner-sentence punctuation helps students parse the text into meaningful blocks, and speeds up comprehension‡.

So, for example, the first of the following sentences is likely to be more immediately comprehensible than the second:

- When you have finished part one, do part three.

- When you have finished part one do part three.

Remember that ESL students are often helped by the direct repetition of a noun

This is better than omitting it or replacing it with a pronoun - even if this doesn't necessarily make for good English style. For example, the second version of the mathematics problem below is probably more easily understood than the first:

- Alex has 4 friends. He wants to buy each of them 6 cookies. How many does he need to buy in all?

- Alex has 4 friends. He wants to buy each friend 6 cookies. How many cookies does he need to buy in all?

Avoid using different nouns (synonyms or hypernyms) to refer to the same thing.

In the following science text, the ESL student may not immediately understand that prey is a hypernym of penguin and refers to it.

It is preferable in tests, therefore, to choose one noun and repeat it, as in the second example below:

- The killer whale tosses the penguin into the air and generally torments its prey before eating it. Why does it do this?

- The killer whale tosses the penguin into the air and generally torments the penguin before eating it. Why does the whale do this?

Take care with vague or ambiguous instruction words.

These can often be replaced by direct questions. For example, the first instruction below may have the ESL student reaching for the dictionary, whereas the second is immediately clear:

- Determine the probability of throwing a 6.

- What is the probability of throwing a 6?

@@@ Avoid worksheet or test questions that assume a cultural knowledge that the ESL students are unlikely to have. ~~~

A mathematics question about the batting average of a baseball player may cause unnecessary difficulties to a student who has never seen the game played and knows nothing about its rules.

Choose simple and familiar contexts for assessment tasks.

For example, the context for a Computing Studies task about the collection and tabulation of data can be the school cafeteria, which students are familiar with, rather than a car factory, which they are not.

Do not include extraneous information in worksheets or tests.

The bold words in the following questions are unnecessary. ESL students may not know this until they have wasted time looking them up in their dictionary:

- Mary bought a turquoise snowboard in a garage sale for $37.50 and promptly resold it for $41.30. What was her profit?

- A cactus has prickly spines on its stem. What particular function do you think these fulfil?

Be aware of the difficulties caused by including a plethora of multi-cultural names in worksheet questions.

ESL students may not immediately recognise words such as Ranjeep, Beatrix, Seamus, Carmelita as names, and attempt to find them in their dictionary.

Better is the simple: A girl buys 2 meters of rail track... , etc.,

Use (labelled) pictures or diagrams where possible

A picture will very often help students with limited English proficiency to understand the assessment task more quickly and completely. Furthermore, illustrations can help to reduce the amount of text that students have to read.

A good example is a task asking students to predict the outcome of a science experiment, which is accompanied by a picture of the equipment set-up.

Where possible separate ideas in bulleted lists (like this one), instead of using dense text.

Make sure that the full text can be seen at all sides of the paper, and that no words are obscured where the holes are punched.

If more than one diagram, chart etc. is to be included in the worksheet, label each one clearly and refer to the label in the question.

It's better to have two well-spaced-out pages than one page cluttered with text in a small typeface. Ensure that there is enough space for students to write answers.

Try to keep the whole question and its space for answers on just one side of the paper

Ensure that copies are legible.

Worksheets that have been cut and pasted from textbooks and then handed down through generations of teachers are notorious for their illegibility.

Remember that your ESL teacher will be happy to check through important worksheets and tests, and advise on their comprehensibility for ESL students.

See the Frequently Asked Questions page for advice on how to help students who struggle to do well in your tests.

See Assessing ESL students in the subject classroom for a comprehensive look at the essential issues concerning setting fair assessments for ESL students and how to grade them.

An increasing amount of communication with students is done via web pages created by the teacher. Here is an article from the Nielsen Norman Group that helps teachers write web content that is legible, readable and comprehensible.