Improve Your ESL Students' ACCESS Test Scores With This Test Taking Strategy Lesson

For many English Language Learners, the WIDA ACCESS exam is more than a language assessment—it’s a high-stakes measure that can influence placement decisions, program services, and how their academic growth is perceived. ESL instruction focuses heavily on language development while assuming that students already know how to take a standardized test (partially because teachers have so little time!). For multilingual learners navigating unfamiliar formats, academic vocabulary, and time constraints in a second language, that assumption can become a barrier to success. Many of my ESL students had hardly ever used a computer before, let alone taken a standardized exam. That's why, every year, I give my MLs (Multinlingual Learners) a whole lesson on how to confront this test (and other state tests) with confidence and strategy.

(If you're looking for a no-prep ACCESS strategies lesson and don't want to keep reading, click HERE.)

Explicitly teaching test-taking strategies helps level the playing field. When ESL students understand how to approach multiple-choice questions, manage their time, use process of elimination, and interpret academic prompts, they are better able to demonstrate what they truly know and feel good about their skills and progress! These strategies do not replace language instruction; rather, they empower students to apply their language skills more effectively under testing conditions. By embedding ACCESS-specific strategies into ESL instruction, you can help reduce anxiety, increase confidence, and ensure that scores more accurately reflect students’ English proficiency (and all the work you've put in)—rather than their confusion with the test itself.

In an age when kids and teens are constantly exposed to 3-second videos on TikTok, "brain rot" shorts on Youtube, and overly stimulating and violent video games, we as teachers have a BIG uphill battle when it comes to getting them to slow down and read carefully and critically.

For most students, their attention spans have been so fractured and their reading stamina so deteriorated that they can't make it through one line of directions, let alone multi-step directions. While we are all sometimes guilty of not reading instructions as thoroughly as we should, we (the non-tech childhood generations) learned how to effectively skim as a strategy. And therein lies one of the issues: we were explicitly taught reading strategies. I clearly remember learning what a subtitle was and why certain words were italicized and how to read a simple informational bar graph. Let me be clear, it's not that teachers don't teach this (they try their hardest!). It's that students are often so low in reading, or, if they can read, they cannot comprehend and decode at the same time, that teachers can't find a minute to carve out of the curriculum to teach these test skills.

All of these issues are compounded ten fold when you are working with ESL students. Many MLs are missing education for myriad reasons and some are even new to using computers. Additionally, other countries don't place the same emphasis on standardized tests that the United States does, so even with all things being equal, the whole concept is entirely foreign to many learners (and their parents). Even for English-speaking Gen-Ed students, the style of standardized tests is often unlike actual literature or news articles. The language of these tests often does not reflect real life stories and texts; therefore we have to work smarter, not harder, and prepare our students strategically.

When it comes to the WIDA ACCESS test, there's a lot we can do to get our students ready and feeling confident in all four language domains. Here's a list of just a few strategies that you can arm your MLs with:

• Process of Elimination--get rid of two out of four answer choices

• Reading the question first

• Paying special attention to bolded, underlined, or italicized words

• Taking a minute to study any pictures or infographics included in the text

• Typing practice--don't forget basic writing conventions

• Restating the question practice for writing and speaking

• Microphone speaking practice with Vocaroo to gauge volume

• Explicitly teaching transition words to use in writing and speaking prompts

• Same as above for cause and effect and compare/contrast language

• Explicitly teaching some key verb forms (simple past, simple future) to show command and range of language skills

  
  

If you are looking for a ready-to-go lesson on ACCESS test taking strategies, I have one prepared for you! Below are some sample pages to give you a preview of the lesson. CLICK HERE to purchase this great resource for your students.