Assessing ELL Students in Mainstream Classes: A New Dilemma for the Teachers

Do the tests accurately measure the knowledge of the students in the subject matter, or do students lose points because of other reasons, such as language proficiency or lack of understanding culturally situated information, even though they know the answers to the questions? [...]this technique can be dangerous; sometimes dictionaries, especially contemporary versions, provide the answer to the assessment questions and therefore the students' knowledge is not being assessed as much as their ability to find answers in a text (Abedi).\n ELL students spend more time thinking about the meaning of the questions, so they need more time to answer the questions. 4.