ABSTRACT
This chapter will address administration and response accommodations which appear to be promising for English language learners (ELLs). It will also present two pretest support options not ordinarily discussed in this context but which are accommodating practices that may have potential. As Kopriva (2000), Abedi (2006a) and Rivera et al. (2006) emphasize, the primary focus for addressing the challenges of ELLs in large-scale testing should be properly adapting standard testing materials (and this has been discussed in the last few chapters). Administration and response accommodations and pretest support are sometimes necessary as well, however, but they are not generally considered to be sufficient if not used in conjunction with appropriate assessments and other linguistic tools and aids. The role of the additional accommodations discussed here seems to be to provide an alternate mechanism for communicating the testing requirements (for instance, oral administration in L1 or English), allowing flexibility in the time or procedures associated with the administration of the assessment, or providing flexibility in how students can explain what they know. The purpose of pretest support, which is distinct from test prep practice in vogue today, is to familiarize students who have different expectations or a lack of some types of experiences associated with large-scale testing.
