| Assessment and placement practices at community colleges that are used to divide students into college ready, ESL and English remedial tracks play a key role in shaping the academic pathways of students (Hughes & Scott-Clayton, 2011). These assessments are based on assumptions of the nature of bilingualism and student needs and thus have implications for linguistically diverse immigrant-origin students (Bunch, Endris, Panayatova, Romero & Llosa, 2011), a population that is increasing at community colleges (Teranishi, Suarez-Orozco, & Suarez-Orozco, 2011).;This mixed-methods study combined critical language testing, (Shohamy, 2001), theories of dynamic bilingualism, (Garcia, 2009), and cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) to answer three questions. First, how do students perceive their bilingual abilities? Second, how do they experience assessment and placement? Third, how do student perceptions dynamically interact with community college practices? Analyzed data included responses of 347 immigrant-origin students to a measure of bilingual confidence collected at three distinct community colleges. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 42 students and analyzed using a grounded theory approach.;Instead of taking assigned categories as a given, cluster analysis uncovered three groups: Confident bilinguals, Less confident bilinguals and English dominant. Qualitatively, student perceptions of their abilities were diverse and differed in significant ways from ascriptive categories. Students perceived assessments to be unchallengeable and had to negotiate placement practices that differed widely by campus, as categories such as "ESL student" were locally constructed. Many students experienced "assessment and placement dissonance," and four themes emerged: "becoming remedial," "speaker identity dissonance," "hard work doesn't pay" and "inducement." Dividing a spectrum of students into binaries of readiness and English language nativity incurs deficit narratives that can affect the engagement and academic trajectories of students. Findings suggest that assessment and placement experiences are not equally distributed or interpreted similarly across student populations, but differentially affect students whose language performance, identities and developmental trajectories may differ from norms. Investigating the impact of assessment and placement as gatekeeping mechanisms is crucial for understanding the academic pathways of immigrant youth and has important implications for equity and integration in globalized spaces. |
