On this webpage, we discuss some of these challenges of assessing the knowledge of students who use English as an additional language (EAL) and steps instructors can take to mitigate them. We start with computer-assisted writing and then move to handwriting and oral assessment.
Computer-assisted writing (e.g. take-home tests, essays, reports):
Why use this form of assessment: Even in the age of AI, there are many good reasons to continue assessing student knowledge through take-home tests, essays, reports, and other types of writing students complete while using a computer. Writing has long been used in U.S. higher education to promote learning and assess student knowledge and. And there are many reasons for this. Writing itself is a mode of thinking, allowing us to clarify our ideas, reflect on our ideas, making connections among ideas, and better remember our ideas. Writing rhetorically—in relation to an audience within a specific context—allows us to learn how to communicate more effectively, impelling us to consider our stance, situate our ideas in relation to ongoing conversations about the topic, and consider language choices (INWAC, 2014, p. 5).
The challenges with this form of assessment: In the age of AI, it can be difficult for instructors to discern which content in student’s work originated with the student and which originated from AI (Cotton, Cotton, & Shipway, 2024). And AI detectors don’t help, as research has demonstrated that they often falsely flag student writing as AI generated, especially the writing of students who use English as an additional language (EAL) (Liang et al., 2023).
What you can do:
- Create clear AI policies: In alignment with the Center for Teaching Innovation, we advise you to be very clear in your policies about which AI uses are allowed and are not allowed. To create this policy, you might refer this list of ways that AI is being used for writing. You might also refer to other Cornell policies and guidelines:
- Define what you mean if you are allowing students to use AI for editing and grammar: If students upload their papers into AI asking for revisions to grammar, the AI tool will do a full re-write of the paper, adjusting not only grammar, but also style, word choice, and structure. The resulting paper will have an “AI voice” (“Ainglish”), which may lead you to question the student’s role in writing the paper.
- Ask students to hand in their chat history. You may consider asking students for the chat history, so that you can see the original draft and the prompt.
- Ask students to use prompts that stop AI from revising their work. If you would prefer to hear more of the student’s voice, consider asking them to use these prompts:
- Prompt 1: I am going to upload my paper. Do not summarize it or make any comments or suggestions until I provide a prompt.
- Prompt 2: Create a table. In the first column identify grammar errors and typos. In the second column, identify the paragraph number and sentence in which you found the problem. In the third column, explain why this is a problem. Do not provide a correction or rewrite the sentence.
- De-emphasize Standard Written English: If you prefer that students not use AI at all, consider taking the pressure off of students, so that they do not feel they need to hand in perfectly edited writing. Consider adding a statement to the syllabus or the assignment saying that you prefer “messy” writing to AI writing.
Handwriting (in-class exams, blue books, in-class essay writing):
Why use this form of assessment: To avoid the problem of AI-impacted writing altogether, some faculty are using in-class writing as a form of assessment (e.g. blue books, in-class written exams) (Hunter, 2026). These forms of assessment retain some of the valuable aspects of computer-assisted writing. However, there are features of in-class writing that may negatively impact EAL students (Barkaoui & Knouzi, 2018; Lee, 2004).
The challenges with this form of assessment: The first challenge is one that would impact all students: writing by hand, without the assistance of a computer, is to write in an artificial environment. Today’s students were raised to write on laptops and other devices. They have benefited from the efficiency of computer-assisted writing: the ease of revision, the built-in spell checks and grammar checks, and the ease of writing quickly without worrying about legibility. They may have never learned to write in cursive, as this has fallen out of the curriculum in many places. For most of today’s students, writing by hand is more cumbersome, slower, and unnatural. Writing by hand for EAL students may be additionally cumbersome if their home language uses a different writing system.
Second, the time-pressure of in-class writing may also cause additional stress for EAL students, resulting in poorer quality writing (Smith, 2011; Khuder & Harwood, 2015).
Third, it is expected that handwritten work by all students will contain more errors—misspellings, issues with syntax, issues with grammar. Handwritten work by EAL students will also include issues related to language transference—missing or incorrect determiners (a, the), incorrect prepositions, issues with verb tense, issues with word order (Silva, 1993). Together, these kinds of issues may be thought of as “written accent.”
To address these challenges:
- Give students more practice writing by hand. You might create small in-class writing activities, such as tickets-to-enter and tickets-to-leave or exploratory writing tasks. These short informal pieces have the added benefit of allowing you to familiarize yourself with your students’ handwriting before a more high-stakes task, such as an in-class exam.
- Allow EAL students to have additional time to complete in-class handwritten tests and papers, an accommodation recommended by researchers (Solórzano, 2008). Research has shown that students who have additional time don’t have an unfair advantage over other students (Gernsbacker et al., 2020).
- Provide students with practice doing timed in-class writing (Lee & Polio, 2026). This practice will allow students to develop strategies for planning writing, such as jotting down ideas or developing a quick outline before starting to write.
- Read past these written errors and try not to let these minor sentence-level issues impact your assessment of the student’s knowledge. As with all forms of assessment, we need to make sure we are assessing only what we have actually taught (Matsuda, 2006, p. 640). See this guide by the Ohio State University on responding to EAL student writing.
Oral assessment
Why use this form of assessment: Since assessing student writing has become more complicated, many instructors are turning to oral assessment (Dobson, 2023). Instructors are either replacing written tests and papers with oral assessment or using oral assessment alongside written assessment, to gauge student’s grasp of concepts they have written about in tests or papers (as a form of an oral defense).
The challenges of using this form of assessment: If using oral assessment alongside written assessment, you might notice a student struggling to discuss what they have written about. This may be due to a couple of reasons. First, students’ level of proficiency in writing and speaking may vary widely, depending on how and where they learned English (Reid, 1988). Resident EAL students (students who immigrated to the U.S. during middle or high school) often are stronger speakers of English than they are writers of English. EAL students who are in the U.S. on a visa or more recently immigrated to the U.S. are often stronger writers of English than they are speakers of English.
Further, stress impacts an EAL student’s ability to access their knowledge of the second language. An oral examination, unlike written examinations, can incur social anxiety (Laurin-Barantke et al., 2016), which may raise a student’s stress level. EAL students may also experience foreign language anxiety—anxiety caused by speaking an additional language in the presence of a native speaker (Stokes, 2025). Time pressure itself may also increase anxiety (as discussed above in relation to timed writing). Anxiety and stress have been shown to impact working memory, causing disfluency (Stokes, 2025).
EAL students’ oral accents may also impact assessment. Pervasive in U.S. culture is linguistic stereotyping—stereotyping based how one speaks. Research has demonstrated that speakers of English as an additional language often face discrimination in the workplace (Hideg et al., 2024) and in higher education (Lourido & Snell, 2025) due to oral accents. Linguistic stereotyping may lead to fewer opportunities for students to speak in class. Native-English speaking students may exclude EAL students during discussions; EAL students themselves may choose not to speak as often in class due to fear of discrimination (Lourido & Snell, 2025, p. 19). EAL students may thus lack experience with speaking in English, leading to a lack of fluency.
It may also be that the instructor cannot understand the student based on their oral accent. Research has shown that a listener’s comprehension is impacted by whether the listener and speaker share a first language (Major et al., 2002) and whether the speaker has learned to focus on sentence stress, pitch, and syllable rhythm, which can greatly impact listeners’ comprehension (Derwing & Munro, 2015). The stress of the assessment situation itself can cause the speaker to lose focus on these elements of clear speech. In this case, the instructor may try to lower the stress by using small talk or providing the student with additional time.
What to do about it:
- Help students prepare for oral assessment by providing low-stakes opportunities for practice during class. You may put students in small groups, give speakers within the groups clear roles (so that no student is left out), and provide speaking topics similar to those included in the assessment.
- Try not to allow accent to influence assessment. Be aware of your own stereotypes in relation to accent as well as not conflate English fluency with knowledge of the work being assessed.
- Work with the student to ensure clear communication. To help the student understand which parts of what they are saying is and is not being communicated, you may repeat the parts of the student’s utterance that you understand and ask for clarification on the parts you did not catch.
- Recommend resources that will help the student work on clear communication. You may refer the student to the English Language Support Office’s resources on pronunciation: the course ELSO 6210 Improving Pronunciation and ELSO’s tutoring service on pronunciation.
References
Barkaoui, K., & Knouzi, I. (2018). The effects of writing mode and computer ability on L2 test-takers’ essay characteristics and scores. Assessing Writing, 36, 19–31.
Burke-Smalley L. A. (2014). Using oral exams to assess communication skills in business courses. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 77(3), 266–280. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329490614537873
Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing. (n.d.). Responding to international student writing. College of Arts and Sciences. The Ohio State University. https://cstw.osu.edu/responding-international-student-writing
Cotton, D. R. E., Cotton, P. A., & Shipway, J. R. (2024). Chatting and cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 61(2), 228-239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2023.2190148
Dobson, S. (2023, April 19). Why universities should return to oral exams in the AI and ChatGPT era. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/why-universities-should-return-to-oral-exams-in-the-ai-and-chatgpt-era-203429
Derwing, T. M. & Munro, M. J. (2015). Pronunciation Fundamentals: Evidence-based Perspectives for L2 Teaching and Research. Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Gernsbacker, M. A., Soicher, R. N., & Becker-Blease, K. (2020). Four empirically based reasons not to administer time-limited tests. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 6(2), 175–190. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000232
Hunter, W. (2026, Sep). The blue book is back. The Atlantic, 338(3). 11-13.
Laurin-Barantke, L., Hoyer, J., Fehm, L., & Knappe, S. (2016). Oral but not written test anxiety is related to social anxiety. World journal of psychiatry, 22(6), 351-357. DOI: 10.5498/wjp.v6.i3.351
Lee, H. K. (2004). A comparative study of ESL writers’ performance in a paper-based and a computer-delivered writing test. Assessing Writing, 9(1), 4–26.
Hideg, I., Shen, W., & Koval, C. Z. (2024). Hear, hear! A review of accent discrimination at work. Current Opinion in Psychology.
INWAC. (2014). Statement of WAC Principles and Practices. https://wacassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Statement-on-WAC-Principles-and-Practices.pdf
Khuder, B. & Harwood, N. (2015). L2 writing in test and non-test situations: Process and product. Journal of Writing Research, 6(3), 233-278. http://dx.doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2015.06.03.2
Lee, J. & Polio, C. (2026). Effects of varying time constraints on quality, linguistic features and fluency behaviors in L2 writing. Assessing Writing, 70, 1-19. DOI: 10.1016/j.asw.2026.101123
Liang, W., Yuksekgonul, M., Mao, Y., Wu, E., & Zou, J. (2023). GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers. Patterns, 4(7), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2023.100779
Lourido, G. T. & Snell, J. (2025). Accent bias and inequities in higher education: A critical perspective on university students’ experiences of accent-based disadvantages. Pre-print. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/sze2k_v1.
Major, R. C., Fitzmaurice, S. F., Bunta, F., & Balasubramanian, C. (2002). The effects of nonnative accents on listening comprehension: Implications for ESL assessment. TESOL Quarterly, 36 (2), 173–190.
Matsuda, P. K. (2006). The myth of linguistic homogeneity in U.S. college composition. College English, 68(6), 637-651.
Reid, J. (1998). ‘Eye’ learners and ‘ear’ learners: Identifying the language needs of international students and U.S. resident writers. In J. Reid & P. Byrd (eds.), Grammar in the Composition Classroom (pp 3–17). Heinle and Heinle.
Silva, T. (1993). Toward an understanding of the distinct nature of L2 writing: The ESL research and its implications. TESOL Quarterly, 4(Winter), 657-677. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587400
Smith, C. (2011). Examinations and the ESL student: More evidence of particular disadvantages. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930903173959
Solórzano, R. W. (2008). High stakes testing: Issues, implications and remedies for English language learners. American Educational Research Association,78(2). https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308317845
Stokes, J. D. (2025). An exploration of how anxiety and working memory affect international students’ English oral communication. Dissertation. University of Bristol.