Constant Leung

Teacher formative assessment and talk in classroom contexts: assessment as discourse and assessment of discourse

There is now widely recognized support for classroom-based formative teacher assessment of student performance as a pedagogically desirable approach to assessment which is capable of promoting learning. However, the highly localized and socially co-constructed nature of this type of assessment has raised conceptual and research issues that transcend the theoretical and epistemological concerns of the more established standardized language assessment. One such issue concerns the part played by classroom spoken discourse in the teaching-assessment interaction between teachers and students. This article argues that there is a need to develop theoretically informed research approaches to study how this type of assessment is accomplished through teacher-student discourse in the classroom. Using data collected in two multiethnic and multilingual elementary classrooms we present an analysis, drawing on systemic functional linguistics, to suggest an approach to empirical research and to discuss a number of teaching-learning and research methodological issues.

Teacher assessment and psychometric theory: a case of paradigm crossing?

Alternative assessment (as opposed to formal testing) is gaining a great deal of attention in current educational discussion. This article attempts to address some of the epistemic and practical issues facing alternative assessment, with particular reference to teacher assessment of spoken English as an additional language/second language (EAL/ESL) in the early years of primary (elementary) education in England and Wales. We first examine the claims made by advocates of alternative assessment in terms of validity and educational relevance. It is argued that such claims are founded on an uneasy articulation of different principles underpinning psychometric measurement and pedagogy. Next we look at some of the reasons why psychometric approaches may not provide an adequate response to pedagogic and policy developments. Then some of the theoretical and practical problems involved in teacher assessment of speaking, focusing on learners with EAL in primary education, are discussed. We focus on the importance of clarity about the epistemological bases of different types of assessment. Additionally, the article highlights the need to be alert to the ways in which political and ideological concerns - together with the influence of professional (teaching) culture - are influential in shaping the properties of assessment systems.

Expanding Horizons and Unresolved Conundrums: Language Testing and Assessment

Since the last TESOL Quarterly commemorative issue 15 years ago, there have been too many important developments in language testing and assessment for all of them to be discussed in a single article. Therefore, this article focuses on issues that we believe are integrally linked to pedagogic and curriculum concerns of English language teaching. Although the discussion has been organized into two main sections, the first dealing with issues relating to formal tests and the second to broader concerns of assessment, we highlight the common themes and concerns running through both sections in the belief that testing and assessment are two sides of the same educational coin. In the first section we address the issue of test authenticity, which underscores much of language testing enquiry. We consider developments in the fields understanding of this notion and suggest that relating test authenticity to target language use may be necessary but insufficient without considering authenticity as it is operationalised in the classroom. In the second section, acknowledging current concerns with standardized psychometric testing, we broaden the discussion to issues of validity, ethics, and alternative assessment. We first consider the intellectual climate in which the debates on such issues has developed and the relevance of these deliberations to pedagogy and curriculum. We then discuss some of the key issues in current classroom-based teacher assessment that are related to and can inform student second language competence and teacher professional knowledge and skills. We end by projecting how the current globalization of English may affect the understanding of authenticity and how this understanding is likely to affect testing and assessment practices worldwide.

Developing formative teacher assessment: knowledge, practice and change

Classroom-based formative assessment by teachers has received a good deal of renewed scholarly and policy interest. The overall aim of this article is to foreground some of the key constitutive issues in this approach to teacher assessment and to suggest possible ways of conceptualizing key epistemological and empirical questions. This discussion raises a number of research and development issues in respect of (a) the conceptual basis of investigating this kind of student-oriented contingent assessment, (b) some methodological questions concerned with classroom-based research, and (c) the need to understand teacher development and teacher change with reference to teacher assessment practice. The concept of construct- referenced assessment (Wiliam, 2001) will be used as a point of departure for the discussion on reconceptualizing and framing the investigation of teacher assessment. A discourse-based approach will be presented in relation to classroom research. The relevance of the work in teacher development and teacher change will be discussed; some of the complexities of teacher development in relation to teacher assessment will be illustrated through data from a teacher professional development program. This discussion has a second language orientation, but many of the arguments will be relevant to language assessment in general.

Teacher Assessment as Policy Instrument: Contradictions and Capacities.

Assessment has been at centre stage of educational reform in England and Wales in the past 15 years. This article argues that official educational assessment policy is essentially indifferent to the technical, pedagogic, and epistemological issues related to different forms of assessment. Policymakers are primarily concerned with “delivering” educational success in terms of reportable rising levels of attainment. The first part of this article provides a contextualized account of the use of assessment as an educational policy instrument and some of the consequences for pedagogy and curriculum provision. Our focal point here is on the assessment of English within the National Curriculum. The second section of the article amplifies our central argument—that policy is uninterested in the technical and educational issues involved in assessment—by offering a detailed critique of the limited and impoverished nature of the infrastructure and support available for teachers to carry out teacher assessment, with particular reference to the assessment of English for pupils whose first/home language is a language other than English. Research data are used to support our observations and arguments. We suggest that there is an urgent need to clarify the distinctions between summative and formative assessment, between the assessment of English as a first language and English as an Additional Language, and between a grammar-based view of English and a cross-curriculum discourse and communication-oriented view of English.

Integrating School-Aged ESL Learners into the Mainstream Curriculum

The concept of integrating ESL learners into the mainstream curriculum has been the subject of debate amongst educationalists and policy makers in many parts of the English-speaking countries in the past 30 years. The issues concerning the integration of ESL students into the mainstream curriculum are multi-dimensional—the label of ESL itself appears to be part linguistic, part educational, part social, and part political. The main purpose of this chapter is to give an account of the multidimensionality of ESL curriculum and practice. The developments in ESL curriculum and pedagogy within the mainstream education system will be looked at first. The influences of wider concerns such as social integration, and rights and entitlements to equal opportunity in public provision will be discussed next. Recent experiences in California, England, and Victoria will be drawn on to illustrate the multi-dimensional nature of ESL policy and practice. This chapter will conclude with some deliberations on the formulation of an analytical framework that may be used to critically examine any ESL curriculum and practice. The central assumption throughout this chapter is that ESL in mainstream schooling can only be understood properly if we pay attention to its unique position at the crossroads of educational, social, and ideological movements.

Mathematical Vocabulary: Fixers of Knowledge or Points of Exploration?.

This paper examines the idea that in mathematics education it is important to wean pupils off the use of informal everyday language and to privilege the use of formal technical vocabulary. I will first make some observations on the use of formal and informal language in the Dimensions transcript. The main focus of the next part of the discussion is on the complexities in establishing core and non-core vocabulary meaning and the need to use words to represent established meaning/s as well as to create new ones. After that I will draw on research in mathematics education to show that informal and formal language (including technical vocabulary)is used in various combinations and that pupils can, indeed need to, use informal language productively to explore concepts represented by technical vocabulary.

Multilingualism in England

A great deal has happened in the study and understanding of multilingualism in England since it was last considered in ARAL (Reid 1985). To examine these changes, this review will concentrate on the dynamic and contested relationships among 1) educational policy, 2) academic discourse, and 3) everyday sociolinguistic practice. Our account is limited to England and to its newer heritage languages; due to limitations of space, it also does not provide any detailed discussion of particular languages. For fuller sociolinguistic discussion of thirty one of these, we refer the reader to Alladina and Edwards (1991), a major step forwards in the documentation of linguistic diversity in the British Isles which provides an idea of the wide but uneven spread of multilingualism across a range of institutional sites (including, for example, press and broadcasting as well as education).

English as an Additional Language--A Genealogy of Language-in-Education Policies and Reflections on Research Trajectories.

ABSTRACT The school population in England is linguistically diverse; according to official data, over one million pupils do not speak English as their first language. All teachers are expected to support English as an additional language (EAL) development as part of their professional responsibility. At the same time, there has been little specific curriculum and assessment specification for EAL within the mainstream curriculum. In the first part of this chapter, I will provide a retrospective analytic account of the educational responses to linguistic diversity, since the publication of the Bullock Report in the 1970s, paying particular attention to the changing provisions and conceptualisations that underpin the ‘mainstreaming EAL’ approach of the past 30 years. The discussion will include an examination of the particular ideological articulation of the notion of equality in education that has influenced this approach. In the second part, I will suggest that research concerned with EAL has been largely filtered through a ‘mainstreamed’ lens that focuses on the ways in which teaching, learning and assessment issues can be explored from a process-oriented curriculum and classroom perspective. It will be argued that future development in EAL provision will benefit from critical research that takes account of alternative curriculum conceptualisations and language development models.

The "social" in English Language Teaching: abstracted norms versus situated enactments

Abstract The worldwide enterprise of English Language Teaching (ELT) has consciously attended to social rules and conventions in its modelling of language use. In this article I will first examine the theoretical basis of the “social” as it has been understood in influential curriculum discussions and internationally marketed textbooks. It will be shown that there is a tendency to portray social conventions of language use in terms of abstracted and decontextualised native speaker norms. Drawing on data collected in ethnolinguistically diverse school and university classrooms in London, I will illustrate that socially agreeable ways of language use are fluidly and sensitively negotiated in situ by participants. Some of the observations and arguments in this article will resonate with the analytic sensibilities shown in recent research in the fields of English as a Lingua Franca and sociolinguistics. The discussion will conclude with a call for a more empirically oriented approach to conceptualizing the “social” in ELT that takes account of situated language and social practices.