Preparing ESL-friendly worksheets and tests

Elsewhere on this site there is advice on helping ESL students understand what they read. What I want to concentrate on here is how to write comprehensible worksheets and tests. A great deal of the learning (and most of the testing) that goes on in school is done by means of written sheets containing tasks for students to perform and questions for them to answer. Sometimes the wording of the task or question is deliberately made obscure in order to challenge the student to think about what is required. In most cases, however, it is intended that student should spend his time thinking about how to do something rather than puzzling over what the teacher wants of him. In such cases, it is essential that the wording of the task or question is as clear and unambiguous as possible.

Making language comprehensible

Following are a few tips on how to make the language of your questions and tasks more easily understood by ESL students:

• Try to use the shorter, more common word in favour of its less frequent equivalent. For example, buy is better than purchase , begin is better than commence , look at the diagram on page 3 is easier than focus your attention on the diagram on the adjacent page, etc. (The exception to this rule is when the object is to introduce or develop vocabulary that is an integral part of the knowledge of the subject.)

• 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, and attempt to find them in their dictionary. Better is the simple: A girl buys 2 meters of rail track .., etc.

• Try to 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.

• Be aware of the difficulty of idioms or 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?

• Take care with punctuation. Generally, it is better to over- rather than underpunctuate even though this goes against the current trend in (British) English style. So, for example, the first of the following sentences is 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 rather than by its omission or its replacement 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?

• Similarly, 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 stick with it.

  The killer whale tosses the penguin into the air and generally torments its prey before eating it.

• Take care with vague or ambiguous instruction words. They 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 immmediately clear:

  Determine the probability of throwing a 6.
  What is the probability of throwing a 6?

• 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 of semi-technical vocabulary. This term refers to non-subject-specific vocabulary that occurs across all disciplines: e.g. duration, eventually, similarity, furthermore, rate, etc. ESL students often fail to comprehend texts fully because they don't know the meanings of such words. If a worksheet contains semi-technical words that are critical to an understanding of the main ideas or task, it would be helpful to explain their meanings in advance. [More on this.]

Preparing legible worksheets

Preparing good worksheets and tests is not simply a matter of ensuring the language of the questions and tasks is readily understandable; it is important to give some consideration to the appearance of the sheet itself. Here are some tips you may wish to follow:

• Type all worksheets/tests. It is very helpful to use different and consistent typefaces and font sizes throughout the year. So, for example, the introductory text is always in one typeface, the question itself in another and the example in yet another.
• 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 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!)

Click here to see some unfriendly worksheets or worksheet questions!

Final thoughts

• However carefully you have prepared your homework sheet, it is very helpful that the students have the chance to read through it first in class and ask for clarification of anything they don't understand.
• 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.