“Come and sit here next to me”: Towards a communicative assessment of oral language skills
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Kris Buyse
Kris Buyse is associate professor at the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts (Applied Language Studies, Teacher Training and Leuven Language Institute), as well as visiting professor at the Universidad Antonio de Nebrija (Madrid) and at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED, Madrid). He teaches Spanish proficiency (writing, Business Spanish, Medical Spanish) and Didactics of Spanish as a Foreign Language. He has published on the corpus-based investigation of translation, lexicography, contrastive linguistics, LSP, CALL and Spanish as a Foreign Language (especially vocabulary acquisition, writing, pronunciation and assessment). For more information, consulthttp://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/en/person/00012653 .
Abstract
As Van den Branden (2007) has pointed out, since communicative approaches have been setting the agenda in language teaching in Belgium, the assessment of oral language competence has shifted its focus from form (i.e. accuracy of vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics) to communicative language proficiency (successful use of language in meaningful situation-based activities rather than the mere mastery of linguistic structures). The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) lists a set of assessment criteria (Council of Europe 2001, 2009, 2011), on which national agencies for curriculum development such as SLO in The Netherlands have based rating grids (as exemplified in CITO/SLO 2010). However, our analysis of a series of grids published online or in book form, together with a corpus of over 100 rating grids used in Belgian language education, shows that it is extremely difficult to focus on both form and communicative output in a single flexible grid; and it is equally difficult to combine in the same grid key concepts of current assessment practice – formative as well as summative, analytic as well as synthetic. We begin by summarizing the demands of current language teaching and assessment and go on to present the conclusions of our analysis of rating grids. We then propose a user-friendly grid for the assessment of oral language competence that is adaptable to the objectives and demands of any language course and does not lose sight of transparency, validity and reliability, three traditional assessment criteria.
About the author
Kris Buyse is associate professor at the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts (Applied Language Studies, Teacher Training and Leuven Language Institute), as well as visiting professor at the Universidad Antonio de Nebrija (Madrid) and at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED, Madrid). He teaches Spanish proficiency (writing, Business Spanish, Medical Spanish) and Didactics of Spanish as a Foreign Language. He has published on the corpus-based investigation of translation, lexicography, contrastive linguistics, LSP, CALL and Spanish as a Foreign Language (especially vocabulary acquisition, writing, pronunciation and assessment). For more information, consult http://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/en/person/00012653.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Bridging passion and profession: Supporting agency and investment in multilingual university writers
- Understanding the learning experiences of postgraduate Latin American students in a UK context: A narrative approach
- Languages for specific academic purposes or languages for general academic purposes? A critical reappraisal of a key issue for language provision in higher education
- Student writing standards: A descending spiral or a bold new direction?
- “Come and sit here next to me”: Towards a communicative assessment of oral language skills
- Special features of assessment in reading comprehension in a Finnish university language centre
- Can blended learning aid foreign language learning?
- Establishing a Korean language programme in a European Higher Education context: Rationale, curriculum and assessment procedures
- Meeting the needs of students, in-service workers and enterprises in a multilingual and multicultural Europe: A challenge for language centres
- Enhancing professionalism through collaboration between teachers and administrators in University Pedagogy courses
