Specific test and supplementary material

It is acknowledged that there is a gap in the field of academic language certification as the assessment of the language competence of students has been mainly based on general linguistic skills and no specific attention has been paid to the assessment of linguistic competence in academic contexts. As certain linguistic elements are needed to support the acquisition of knowledge in content areas, a specific test is required to certify the students’ abilities in the use of academic language. This language is essential for students to adequately progress in the learning of academic content.

The IBmodel project will develop and administer specific tests for the assessment of academic language related to content subjects. These tests address all language skills and associated cognitive discourse functions. Tests will be piloted in different Primary and Secondary schools in Spain, Portugal and Italy to obtain the necessary data for their analysis. Furthermore, the project aims to create supplementary material to support the effective use of the standardized certification tests that will improve the coordination of the learning of general English and the specific language needed for the content of the various school subjects (the non-linguistic areas in European bilingual programmes).

complementary material

TARGET GROUPS

– Institutions specialized in the certification of linguistic competence.
– Authorities responsible for the design of educational policies at the primary and secondary levels.
– Management teams and managers of educational institutions.

INNOVATION ELEMENTS

A) Attention, measurement and specific certification of academic language as a central element for the construction of meaning in the bilingual classroom.
B) Collaboration between researchers, assessment experts and foreign language specialists and specialists in content subjects to develop a series of tests to measure the students’ academic linguistic competence.

EXPECTED IMPACT

– Improvement of evaluation systems adapted to the reality of bilingual education.
– Improvement in the measurement of academic linguistic competence.
– Improvement in the evaluation of the abilities of the students.

TRANSFERABILITY POTENTIAL

To all contexts and educational levels in which bilingual education is carried out.

The tests have been digitalized and are avaliable in a platform so that they can be carried out more easily by any school or educational institution. This aspect is a clear commitment to one of the project’s priorities: INNOVATIVE POLICIES IN A DIGITAL AGE.

Tests have been developed for Natural Sciences and Social Sciences in Primary and also for Physics and Chemistry, History and Geography in Secondary.

They include the evaluation of the four skills in the disciplinary language (oral and written comprehension and oral and written production). Authentic materials, written and adiovisual, have been used. We have also tried to use topics and activities, relevant, interesting and attractive. For example, interviews with media figures such as Greta Thunberg have been used when the topic of climate change is tackled.

We hope that these tests may constitute a new focus of interest for the evaluation of bilingual systems and generate advances in the production of valid indicators to assess the progress of students in an effective and objective manner. Our partners at the University of Córdoba and the University of Porto are already preparing high-impact scientific articles based on these lines of research, a fact that will help us to disseminate the results and also to establish new lines of work and research that may contribute to the improvement of bilingual education probrammes across Europe.

Supplementary Materials

NEEDS ANALYSIS

Given the need to design tests of a specific nature that can certify the real abilities of students to use academic language, it is also necessary to develop materials that are also specific for the preparation of a diagnostic instrument of this kind. The preparation of the standard tests for the certification of linguistic competence suffers from a lack of specificity also with regard to the complementary materials to facilitate this preparation. This is why our effort has been also directed to provide with useful complementary materials.

TARGET GROUPS

– Institutions specialized in the certification of linguistic competence.
– Publishers specializing in the preparation of evaluation materials and tests.

TRANSFERABILITY POTENTIAL

All contexts and educational levels in which bilingual education is being implemented.

INNOVATION ELEMENTS

A) Helping to achieve a more complete measurement and specific certification of academic language as a central element for the construction of meaning in the bilingual classroom.
B) Collaboration between researchers and assessment experts to develop complementary training materials to help carry out the test that will measure academic linguistic competence.

EXPECTED IMPACT

A) Improvement of evaluation systems adapted to the reality of bilingual education.
B) Improvement in the measurement of academic linguistic competence.
C) Improvement in the evaluation of the abilities of the students.
D) Modelling the preparation of the specific test for the measurement of linguistic competence of an academic nature.

DEVELOPMENT OF OUTPUT

The context in which this complementary material has been developed responds to the need to use appropriate materials with properties such as validity and reliability, that is, that serve to effectively measure what is sought to be evaluated and that the results of the evaluation are constant and systematic regardless of the variables that affect the students.
For the elaboration of the material, in the first place, an analysis of the theoretical framework was carried out with the objective of outlining a set of categories and variables that, when applied for the creation of the materials, could show us their pedagogical potential for the improvement of teaching skills. the language (speaking, listening reading and writing) and its degree of adaptation to the specific needs of primary and secondary school students in the subjects to be evaluated.
Subsequently, we proceeded to determine if the pedagogical treatment that was going to be applied to the complementary materials could help improve the rest of the linguistic skills. Thus, it was decided that the materials should offer a pedagogical proposal aimed at improving listening, speaking, reading, and writing language skills. And through them, which could serve to assess the ability of students to use the linguistic resources associated with the discursive functions that are the object of measurement in the different tests.
Next, the work team began to work on the definition of the textual genres on which they were going to work: narration, argumentation, explanation and description. As well as in the identification of the presentation models of these genres, the discursive functions that represent them, the syntactic structures that appear mostly and the vocabulary that is used.
Once this categorization was defined, we proceeded to develop the activities that would accompany each of the tests following the aforementioned methodological premises. And, once made, the evaluation procedure was designed. To do this, first of all, the dimensions through which the results obtained were going to be codified (not satisfactory, weak, satisfactory, good, very good) were decided, as well as the scores for each of the activities. Excel tables were also designed in which the results obtained were going to be dumped. And finally, one of the most important elements for the evaluation process was designed, the elaboration of rubrics for each one of the educational levels (Primary and Secondary) that will help us to analyze and evaluate the results in a systematic and homogeneous way.
Our goal is that these materials can serve as a model for the future preparation of tests aimed at evaluating the students’ competence to manage textual genres, functions and associated discursive strategies, all of which are basic elements for the construction of meaning. By means of these supplementary materials it is intended to offer an aid in the process of verifying these capacities. Thus, teachers who want to obtain this type of knowledge from their students will be able to count on a guide and a battery of appropriate tools that will allow them to achieve their goals.