Integrating Assessment into Early Language Learning and Teaching

Shelagh Rixon, Danijela Prošić-Santovac

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788924801
• eBook ISBN: 9781788924832
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The volume unites research and practice on integrating language learning, teaching and assessment at preschool and early school age. It includes chapters written by experts in the field who have studied some of the very youngest (pre-primary) children through to those up to the age of 12, in a variety of private and state contexts across Europe. The collection makes a much-needed contribution to the subject of appropriate assessment for children with the focus of many chapters being classroom-based assessment, particularly formative assessment, or the case for developing assessment skills in relation to even the youngest children. As a whole, the book provides useful case study insights for policymakers, teacher educators, researchers and postgraduate students with interest in or responsibility for how children are assessed in their language learning. It also provides practical ideas for practitioners who wish to implement greater integration of assessment and learning in their own contexts.

1Introduction: Assessment and Early Language Learning

Shelagh Rixon and Danijela Prošić-Santovac

Definitions of Assessment

In the English language, two distinct terms, evaluation and assessment, are available and the consensus in the world of education and training is that it is useful to keep them separate, for two different, although related, types of activity. Evaluation refers to the process of judging how worthwhile or successful a venture (e.g. a training course) or a product (e.g. a set of course materials) can be shown to be, and is ‘about forming a judgement, and providing evidence, about the worth of something’ (Germaine & Rea-Dickins, 2014: 11). On the other hand, assessment, the subject of this volume, will in our usage refer to principled ways of collecting and using evidence on the quality and quantity of people’s learning. It is worth bearing in mind the distinction between the two English terms and the two fields of activity because it may not be consistently expressed in the literature, especially in other languages when only one word, often a cognate of the word ‘evaluation’, may be in general use for both. What the two processes have in common is collection of data and use of evidence. In fact, many evaluations of educational projects may make use of data drawn from assessment of learners’ attainments, but in the best cases this would always be in combination with other sorts of evidence such as interviews with teachers and learners, classroom observations and analysis of documents.

Purposes and Formats for Assessment

It will be readily seen that the definition of assessment given above allows for activities that are more varied than tests and examinations and leaves space for perspectives that go beyond the summative use of assessment, which is perhaps still most frequently associated with the term, especially by members of the public outside the teaching profession. The distinction between summative and formative assessment was made more than half a century ago by Scriven (1967) and lies behind many debates that have taken place since then. Summative assessment is backward-looking and concerned with finding out at the end of a period of learning how well the learners have performed in retaining content and/or in their use of skills taught. Formative assessment, on the other hand, looks to the future and concerns ways of collecting information on how successfully learners are responding during, rather than at the end of a learning sequence such as a course, a module or even a single lesson. Thus, it allows both teachers and learners to take action and make adjustments in order to improve both processes and outcomes in the next stages of learning. In terms of the main theme of this volume, which is the integration of assessment into pedagogical practice, it may seem that formative assessment is inherently closer to what takes place in the classroom. However, in the chapters that follow, discussions of both summative and formative assessment regarding their relationships with teaching and learning will find a rightful place.

Summative Assessment and Pedagogy

For many people, the term summative assessment has connotations of tests and examinations and therefore of events which for the learners may be very high-stakes (i.e. of great importance to their future life-chances and welfare). The gaining of certification and also of access to future benefits, such as a place in a desirable school or college, are often still wholly determined by the results of examinations. In such circumstances, the content and focus of high-stakes tests or examinations will naturally dominate what teachers teach and what learners want to learn. When matters of curriculum reform are under discussion, it is the teaching that inevitably accommodates itself to the examinations. It is therefore not surprising when authorities such as Wedell (2011) claim that, without attention to calibrating assessment so that it matches syllabus and pedagogy, no innovations in language teaching have a chance of becoming truly embedded.

Impact by design

A benign interpretation of the power of tests and examinations that is applied in the field of EFL is that of Impact by Design put forward by Saville (2010, 2012). This foregrounds skills or aspects of language learning that are seen as desirable and ensures that they are embedded in national or international examinations. In 1997, for example, Cambridge English Language Assessment, as it was then known, introduced its first international tests (Starters, Movers and Flyers), for children between 6 and 11. These examinations are frequently taken by children learning English in private institutes, but they have also influenced teaching within some national educational systems through their deployment in developmental projects. In the 2000s, these examinations were followed by the Cambridge ‘for schools’ suite of examinations for children at lower secondary school level. All have had an impact on syllabuses and pedagogy, particularly in encouraging value to be given to speaking and listening skills in countries where these were previously little taught, if at all (see Chambers et al. (2012) on the Hebei project in China, and Salamoura et al. (2012: 32) on influences in France).

Reports by teachers

In the world of primary and pre-primary education, perhaps the commonest form of summative assessment is that carried out by teachers in their periodic, usually termly or annual, reports to parents and carers, which may sometimes also go on official record with the educational authorities. Such reports may be given in the form of letter or number grades or in the form of written comments, sometimes a combination of the two. In either case, for them to be useful, as well as to ensure fairness, they need to be transparent and evidence-based. These requirements are more likely to be met if the criteria for making a comment or awarding a grade are published and thus available to all. These may take the form of statements not only of what types of achievements are valued but also of descriptions of desirable behaviour or attitudes such as perseverance and resilience. Frameworks such as the Early Years Foundation Stage in England and Wales (Department of Education, 2017) for pre-primary aged children give clear examples and show that a variety of criteria going beyond pure ‘school work’ may be considered important. Evidence-based assessment requires that links can be shown between the judgements made and examples of a child’s responses to teaching, be it in written work, drawings, samples of speech or observed behaviour indicative of approaches to learning. If the manner in which teachers writing reports summatively scrutinise and value learners’ work is at odds with the professed aims of their teaching, learners will receive mixed messages about what is important in their learning and will find it hard to understand how to improve their school performance.

Criterion referencing and norm referencing

Within summative assessment, a consideration of criterion- and norm-referenced approaches is relevant to the integration of assessment and pedagogy because of their differing impacts on teaching and classroom climate. Norm-referencing, in which ranking of candidates is fundamental, is the traditional, historically well-established approach in many societies and is associated with highly competitive situations, what Hamp-Lyons (2007) calls an ‘exam culture’ rather than a ‘learning culture’. Performances are usually represented by numerical scores and very small differences in these will determine a pupil’s rank so that, even within a group of learners with roughly equal overall actual attainments, a distinction between the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ performers will be made. This may be a suitable approach when decisions are to be made about limited resources, such as who should win a prize or gain entry to an elite institution (Rixon, 2016: 36), but it does not naturally lead to harmony and cooperation within a community of learners. On the other hand, criterion-referenced assessment, which allows learners to be granted equal credit for their learning provided that they meet specific requirements, does not set one learner against another and is more readily associated with co-operative learning. Criteria, as expressed in CAN DO statements, for example, are often descriptions of precise areas of learning and are verbally rather than numerically expressed. The contrasting assumptions and convictions underlying these two approaches may be strongly held by stakeholders, including parents, and attempts by educational reformers or teacher educators to promote switches from one system to the other, usually a move from norm-referenced to criterion-referenced approaches, can lead to considerable unrest (e.g. Hong Kong; Carless, 2010).

Developments in Formative Assessment

When the concept of formative assessment was first introduced, the emphasis, as seen in Scriven’s (1967) account, was on its timing – the fact that it should take place not at the end, but during a course or other educational experience when improvements in teaching and learning are still possible. In that sense, formative assessment was even at that stage viewed as integrated assessment. However, in order to discover the state of learners’ attainment or understanding, it was quite likely that a summative classroom test might be the instrument used and the remedy would be seen mainly as in the teacher’s hands, usually in the form of modified teaching, designed to meet the needs of a whole class or sizable groups within it. The concept of formative assessment has developed over the years (Torrance & Pryor, 1998) to move beyond the timing of information-gathering and the modification of teaching. It now concerns purposeful interaction between the participants and in particular the quality of feedback exchanged. Formative assessment is likely in recent times to employ more direct data collection methods, such as observation or scrutiny of samples of work that learners have done in everyday classroom circumstances. Agency in this process is still most frequently with teachers, but involvement by and information from the learners on their perceptions of learning has been ever-increasing.

Assessment for Learning

Since the end of the 20th century, Assessment for Learning (AfL; Black & Wiliam, 1998), with the maximum integration of assessment and pedagogy, has become influential in a number of educational settings, including England, where its use in state schools, at the time of writing, is mandatory. AfL is often seen as a branch or an adaptation of formative assessment, but for many who work with it, it is qualitatively so distinct as to constitute a movement of its own. The main shift is in the power relations within class, with decision-making now distributed more equally between teacher and learner. There may still be a focus on how teaching should be modified to accommodate learners’ current state of knowledge, understanding or skills, but considerably more evidence comes directly from the learners’ point of view. A major aim is to support children in their own decisions about what they need to do next in order to improve, consolidate or develop their learning. The pupils play a very big part in informing the teacher not only about what they know but about what they need, providing indications of their levels of confidence and understanding.

Peer- and self-assessment

Feedback from the teacher focuses on what the learner did well before setting out a path along which improvements may be made, while learners can also contribute by scrutinising their own work or that of others. The purpose of self-assessment and peer-assessment is not to award grades, although much of the early suspicion of these practices came from those who associate assessment only with summative, competitive grading, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Key Abbreviations
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Assessment and Early Language Learning
• Part 1: Why Testing Is Not Enough
• Part 2: Integrating Assessment into Learning and Teaching: Approaches
• Part 3: Integrating Assessment into Learning and Teaching: Tools
• Part 4: From Policy to Practice Through Professional Development
• Index