ClassSense for ESL and ELL teachers

Language teachers elsewhere on this site have the worry that the tool might not work in French or German. Yours is the reverse: the tool works in English, and your students are the ones still learning it. That changes what it is good for, and the first thing to settle is what a wrong answer means.

The measurement problem

When an English learner misses a science question, there are two possible reasons, and a score cannot tell them apart. They may not know the science, or they may not have read the question. ClassSense tracks mastery per student per skill, and a Struggling label on a language-heavy skill can mean either. You are the one who knows the child. Use the Override on a student's status, with a reason, when what you know disagrees with what the grid says.

What it can honestly offer

• Practice from the material you already use. Upload the vocabulary list, the reading, or the content-area unit your students are working through. Each upload becomes up to 10 skill packs.
• Reading supports a teacher switches on per student. Read-aloud, word highlighting, an easier font, more spacing, a colour overlay and larger text. These are general reading supports, set for one student at a time. They were not built as language-learning features, and the read-aloud voice is a synthetic English one.
• Hints and feedback on every question, with a short explanation when an answer is wrong.
• Explanations at three depths. That is about conceptual depth, so check whether the simplest one is also simple in its English. It may not be.
• Low-pressure mode, which removes timers and hides scores. Useful for a newcomer who freezes under a clock.

The language you cannot ignore

Jim Cummins distinguished conversational fluency from academic language proficiency, and the gap matters here. A student can chat comfortably in the hall and still fail to parse a word problem. Isabel Beck's framing of tiers of vocabulary helps too: everyday words, general academic words that appear across subjects (analyze, contrast, evidence), and narrow subject words (photosynthesis). The middle tier is the one that quietly sinks learners across every class. A vocabulary list that targets those words, uploaded as a unit, is a decent use of this tool.

A workable pattern

1. Upload a short unit of the content vocabulary your students need next week, and read the packs for question wording that is harder than the concept.
2. Switch on read-aloud and word highlighting for the students who use them, and low-pressure mode for the ones who shut down.
3. Use the student grid to spot who is stuck, then sit with them. A stuck student is a reason for a conversation, not a diagnosis.
4. Keep all oral practice, sentence frames and writing in your room.

Learning supports are tools a teacher turns on. ClassSense does not diagnose anyone and is not an IEP or placement tool, so an English learner who also has a learning difference still needs the people who can assess that. The read-aloud and accommodations page describes what each support does. If you also teach a content area, the English and ELA page covers reading and vocabulary work for native speakers, and differentiated instruction covers giving two students different routes through one skill. If your class includes students learning a world language, see the world language page.

Common questions