The role of scaffolding in children’s questions: Implications for (preschool) language assessment from a usage-based perspective
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Heike Behrens
,
Karin Madlener
Abstract
This article outlines a range of theoretical, empirical, and practical desiderata for the design of (preschool) language assessments that follow from recent insights into language development from a cognitive-linguistic and usage-based perspective. To assess children’s productive communicative abilities rather than their ability to judge the acceptability of complex sentences in isolation is a new perspective in language testing that requires theoretical motivation as well as operationalizable criteria for judging the appropriateness of children’s language productions, and for characterizing the properties of their language command. After a brief review of the basic rationale of current strands of preschool assessment in Germany (Section 2), the fundamental usage-based assumptions regarding children’s developing linguistic competence and their implications for the design of preschool language diagnostics are characterized (Section 3). In order to assess children’s language production, in particular its flexibility and productivity in context, a test environment needs to be created in which children are allowed to use a certain range of language in meaningful contexts. Section 4 thus zooms in on the central question of scaffolding. Section 5 presents corresponding corpus evidence for adult strategies of prompting children to elaborate their answers and for typical child responses. Sections 6 and 7 discuss the corpus-based findings with respect to their implications for the design of ( preschool) language assessment and point to further challenges.
© 2016 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Section A
- Introduction: Cognitive approaches to L2 learning and teaching
- German modals in second language acquisition: A constructionist approach
- „Im Deutschen kan das nicht“ – Text type didactics for the teaching of German modal verb constructions
- Path encoding in German as a foreign language: Difficulties encountered by L1 Spanish learners
- One step closer to the target: Using Construction Grammar to teach the expression of motion events to Japanese learners of English
- Section B
- Metaphors and grammar teaching
- The acquisition of the German case system by foreign language learners through computer animations based on cognitive linguistics
- Animation of grammar – Interplay of cognitive linguistics and multimedia learning: The example of German modal auxiliaries
- Teaching the form-function mapping of German ‘prefield’ elements using Concept-Based Instruction
- Frame-based instruction: Teaching polysemous nouns in the L2
- Conceptual motivation as a tool for raising language awareness in the English as a foreign language classroom – Does it enhance learning outcomes? Insights from an empirical study
- A lexical-semantic analysis of the English prepositions at, on and in and their conceptual mapping onto Arabic
- Section C
- The role of scaffolding in children’s questions: Implications for (preschool) language assessment from a usage-based perspective
- Destabilisation, IL variation and restructuring in foreign language learning
- Gesture as a window onto conceptualization in multiple tasks: Implications for second language teaching
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Section A
- Introduction: Cognitive approaches to L2 learning and teaching
- German modals in second language acquisition: A constructionist approach
- „Im Deutschen kan das nicht“ – Text type didactics for the teaching of German modal verb constructions
- Path encoding in German as a foreign language: Difficulties encountered by L1 Spanish learners
- One step closer to the target: Using Construction Grammar to teach the expression of motion events to Japanese learners of English
- Section B
- Metaphors and grammar teaching
- The acquisition of the German case system by foreign language learners through computer animations based on cognitive linguistics
- Animation of grammar – Interplay of cognitive linguistics and multimedia learning: The example of German modal auxiliaries
- Teaching the form-function mapping of German ‘prefield’ elements using Concept-Based Instruction
- Frame-based instruction: Teaching polysemous nouns in the L2
- Conceptual motivation as a tool for raising language awareness in the English as a foreign language classroom – Does it enhance learning outcomes? Insights from an empirical study
- A lexical-semantic analysis of the English prepositions at, on and in and their conceptual mapping onto Arabic
- Section C
- The role of scaffolding in children’s questions: Implications for (preschool) language assessment from a usage-based perspective
- Destabilisation, IL variation and restructuring in foreign language learning
- Gesture as a window onto conceptualization in multiple tasks: Implications for second language teaching
