Best Free ESL Assessment & Guide for ESL Teachers

Why This ESL Assessment Is So Useful

This ESL assessment includes the following sections and helps give you practical, actionable data for each language domain. There is also a tracking sheet that makes it easy to gather the results into one place. Here are the sections covered in the assessment:

1. Speaking & Listening
2. Vocabulary
3. Phonics
4. Reading
5. Grammar
6. Writing & Spelling

Since different students struggle with different things and different students will be stronger and weaker in different areas, you need a clear and practical way to gain insights into these differences. This assessment will make clear students who speak well but struggle with reading, or students who read and write well but cannot speak confidently.

Ways the Assessment Can Be Used

There are a few ways you can use the assessment with your students:

1. Assess newcomers who have just arrived. When students first arrive, you need to get a clear picture of what they know and what they don’t know. That way you can get them working on the things that will make the biggest difference in the student’s education. 
2. Monitor student progress over time. You can also use the assessment again after a period of time to see how the student is progressing. 
3. Decide on the teaching materials that would be most appropriate for each group of students. If you are wondering which materials would be best for a particular student, this assessment will help you decide.

This resource took over a decade to develop and has helped 100s of English language teachers gain helpful insights into their students’ English abilities.

This 20-page test and guide are the result of over a decade of testing incoming students and tracking their progress. I hope it benefits you as much as it has benefited me.

A Little Background About the Kid-Inspired English Language Assessment

I struggled for years to know how best to test incoming students’ English levels.

There were so many factors involved.

Too often, I relied on my gut which at times worked out, and at other times let me down.

I started developing this test to help remedy the problem.

Ten years and hundreds of students later, it has become an incredibly helpful tool.

The goal is to give as straightforward and unbiased an assessment as possible.

Clearly understanding a student’s English ability is the first step to knowing how to help them improve.

Wondering what to do after you give students the assessment? The article below is for you!

If you are an ELL teacher, thank you for the work that you do.

It is not easy, but you make an enormous difference in the children’s lives you reach. Keep up the hard work and let me know if there is anything I can do to help you!

FREE ESL Assessment & Guide for ESL Teachers

How to Use the Kid-Inspired ESL Assessment

If you’re a member of the Kid-Inspired ESL Curriculum Membership, there is also mini-course on how to use the assessment.

Here are a Few Notes on Grading the Assessment

There is a little ruler of numbers at the top of each section of the assessment tracking sheet. These little rulers correspond to the questions in that section.

You take the number from here that the student received and write it at the bottom in the Score area.

Once you have numbers for each area in this score box, you average them together for an overall level (add up listening/speaking, vocabulary, reading, writing, grammar and divide by 5)

There are two sections for the reading: reading to decode and reading for comprehension. You can average these two scores together for the reading score.

What do you think? Leave me a comment below!