I took WIDA ACCESS practice tests on 6th-8th grade listening and reading. It seemed like there was a tug-of-war between what's measurable and what's actually meaningful. On paper, WIDA promises a "standards-referenced" measure of English proficiency, aligned to an ELD framework and used for accountability and reclassification. But Garcia and Kleifgen's discussion of the "power of assessments" reminds me that tests sort, track and often punish emergent bilinguals when language proficiency and content proficiency are collapsed into a single score.
When planning instruction, I can't let the test become the curriculum. I do want to mine WIDA standards and proficiency descriptors for language goals. Naming, for instance, the types of arguments, text structures or disciplinary language students will need in science or social studies. However, I pair that with Garcia et al.'s distinction between "general linguistic performance" and "language-specific performance" and ask: what can this student already do with their full repertoire that the test will never see? That question pushes me toward performance-based and bilingual assessments (e.g., oral projects, multimodal portfolios, group problem-solving), so I'm not mistaking English-only output for total academic ability.
Padia, Cioe-Pena and Phuong's TrUDL framework adds another layer, especially for emergent multilinguals labeled as disabled. They warn against falling into "UDL or multilingual supports," where access is framed either through disability or through language, but not both. TrUDL asks me to design from the start for multimodal, multilingual and racially conscious access: multiple ways to engage (e.g., discussion, drawing, movement), and multiple ways to express understanding (e.g., home language writing, voice notes, visuals), and multiple ways to represent content (e.g., bilingual texts, audio, visuals, manipulatives). That's funds of knowledge work, but scaled up and systematized.
Digital tools (Garcia et al.) help me imagine how this can look in real classrooms, such as students using online images, audio and video, plus their home languages, to assemble "ensembles" of modes as they research or explain ideas. Multimodality here lowers linguistic load, opens more entry points for EMLADs and legitimizes the whole communicative repertoire.
I see some tensions, like how WIDA is still English-only, still high-stakes, and still tied to arbitrary exit cut scores. TrUDL and translanguaging encourage me toward porous language boundaries, flexible grouping and student-designed products. Yet, I don't think that they're incompatible. I can treat standards-based assessments as one data point through using them to name explicit language targets while letting funds of knowledge, translanguaging and TrUDL mold how students get there and how I recognize their learning along the way.