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Language Assessor

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For Margarita Villareal, the pictures that hang on her office walls conjure up the past and serve as a bridge to the future.

They show her with students of an elementary class that she taught for many years after she moved from Sacramento, California, to Fresno, California, in the early 1970s.

But this was not a traditional class. It was part of an ongoing program for students with limited English language skills. It allows them to use their native language alongside English in classrooms.

The idea behind allowing another language of instruction is to help students with their studies while helping them ease into an English-speaking environment. This program has been a prominent object in the social landscape of multiracial California, where it is easy to survive without knowing a single word of English.

The class prepared Villareal for her current career as a language assessor.

It began when her principal noticed her skills in recognizing the language needs of her students. So he encouraged her to formalize her training in language assessment and in its administration.

"I finally made the decision to do that because it is difficult leaving a class of students," says Villareal. Last year, she became the program manager of the language assessment center run by her school district. "Now, I have some of my former students bringing their children to our center for assessment."

And when they come, Villareal likes to point up to the pictures on the walls and tell them funny stories about their mothers and fathers when they were young.

Those pictures are not just sources of nostalgia, though. They help Villareal break the ice. Language assessors often use common objects to help them find out more about their clients and their language needs during the interview part of an assessment.

Villareal and her staff also use play when they work with children who are shy. "Sometimes, you will see a child using a puppet to respond because they are so quiet themselves," she says.

A language assessment also includes a more formal written part. It is often done over a computer. But technology can only go so far, says Wes Schroeder. He is the manager of an ESL (English as a second language) service.

Yes, computers have made the assessment process easier. "But you still need the assessor to witness and to interact [with the client] to form and evaluate the questions," he says. And not everybody can use a computer right away, he adds.

More importantly, a computer cannot fully appreciate and understand the struggles that are part of living in a new country and trying to learn its language. Only another human being can. The best language assessors can easily empathize and sympathize with their clients. Language assessors must also respect their clients and everything about them.

Schroeder says the worst thing an assessor can do is to belittle the intelligence or background of clients. "Just because somebody cannot properly read or write English does not mean that they are not intelligent," he says.

Adriana Parau is the coordinator of a language assessment center. She remembers a man from the former Yugoslavia who came to her center for an assessment a few years ago.

Trained as an engineer, he spoke little English. On the assessment test, he ranked a level two. That's a very low ranking when you consider there are eight different levels of English proficiency.

"So he was referred to a school, and two [or] three months later, he had moved to a level six," Parau says. "At that point, we could refer him to a pre-employment program, and he found employment. It is our conviction that we shortened his search for all these things by probably at least half a year."

Like so many language assessors who work in North America, Parau is a new arrival. A former English literature teacher and media translator, Parau left Romania in 1993 to continue her teaching career.

Her strong English made the transition into her new life easier. But she too had to overcome obstacles. And they gave her a sense of what others who do not have the same language skills experience when they come to a new country.

"It is...really frightening because you don't know anything. You just don't know where to start from, and just finding that little direction that can take you to the right place is amazing." It was this realization that inspired Parau's current career choice.

"When I got here, I was aware that teaching was somewhere down the road," she says. "Language assessment seemed like the next best thing, and now it is the first best thing."

Villareal, meanwhile, has worked with new language learners for 26 years now. And she is far from finished.

In one year alone, she and her staff assessed and referred some 5,000 students to English language programs. There will not be a shortage of work. Some 100 different languages are spoken in her area.

The pay is meager. "But I think you go into education for the love of what you are going to do, not for the money," says Villareal.

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