Thirdly, the significance of the impact of the language programme require- ments in evaluation should also be considered. As described earlier, the teach- ers presented in this chapter employed academic essays and presentations as assessment tasks because the programme required them to include these com- ponents in the evaluation. The required components play a vital role when teachers decide what tasks to employ in their teaching. With academic essays and presentations being required by the programme, teachers could avoid heavily relying on paper-and-pencil tests to assess students’ performance in both language and content, which offer few options for assessing content, especially in terms of critical thinking skills. Also, as in the case of the pro- gramme in this study, if there is flexibility in allowing teachers to decide how they evaluate students’ essays and presentations, teachers have options in how they assess content as non-specialists and can consider student needs. The teachers could successfully incorporate research projects into their assessment tasks to assess content and critical thinking skills (i.e., logicality, interesting- ness, etc.) as well as language. As programme requirements have great impacts on the teachers’ decisions regarding the assessment tasks, unified components offering reasonable flexibility should be considered.
Although much of the above may be reassuring, there are some notes of caution that should be highlighted. While teachers should be aware of stu- dents’ preferences for performance tests or task-based assessments, this should not necessarily mean that the use of paper-and-pencil tests to assess content and language should be restricted. They may be useful as part of a larger vari- ety of assessment tasks to be employed to assess content mastery, including factual recall and general understanding (Genesee & Hamayan, 2016; Llinares et al., 2012), as research projects are not always suitable to measure an under- standing of the content learnt in class. It is also worth noting that when paper- and- pencil tests are used (e.g., Coyle et al., 2010; Lin, 2016), teachers may need to clearly inform their students of what the tests intend to measure so that students can fully grasp how to prepare for them.
A further important consideration that emerged from the studies was that there may be at times a mismatch between teachers’ assessment practice and students’ perceptions. The teachers largely indicated that critical thinking skills was a main focus of assigning research projects which culminated in presentations and writing. Yet, the students seemed to perceive that the focus was content mastery. Critical thinking skills were never mentioned by the students in their comments. A critical thinking focus may need to be made clearer to students, with relevant critical thinking objectives outlined in rubrics. Also, although teachers assessed a variety of linguistic features of stu- dents’ performance in writing and presentations, there were some students
who perceived that evaluation was mostly focused on content. The implica- tion here is that teachers should specify what aspects of content (Coyle et al., 2010) are the focal points in these assessment tasks. In addition, it is necessary for teachers to clearly inform their students of assessment criteria (e.g., in the form of rubrics) to raise students’ awareness of what is required to receive a good score. Related to this, as teachers raised concerns about assessing infor- mativeness and interestingness, this again is an aspect that should be clearly defined for the students in terms of their performance.
In summary, we suggest that while assessment for content and language can work very well for both teachers and students on language-driven CLIL courses, the question of how content is to be assessed can be interpreted by teachers in many different ways which may lead to a lack of clarity for the students in exactly what they are being assessed for. In addition, as long as the content and language aims are clear to students, essays and presentations seem to be reasonable tasks as required assessment at the programme level. In order to achieve transparency in assessment, we argue that rubrics for assessment tasks such essays and presentations are essential on language-driven CLIL courses.
Suggested Further Reading
Solano-Flores, G. (2016). Assessing English language learners: Theory and prac- tice. New York, NY: Routledge.
This book contains essential notions for assessing English language learners’
content knowledge. CLIL language teachers can benefit from Chapter 5 (Assessing Content Knowledge) in particular, which discusses the task types that are suitable for assessing different types of knowledge.
Cheng, L., & Fox, J. (2017). Assessment in the language classroom. London, UK: Palgrave.
This book covers a wide range of important and basic concepts related to classroom language assessment, including why, what, and how we assess.
Through this book, CLIL practitioners can learn how to align learning goals and assessment.
Brown, J. D. (Ed.). (2012). Developing, using, and analyzing rubrics in lan- guage assessment with case studies in Asian and Pacific languages. Honolulu, HI:
University of Hawai’i, National Foreign Language Resource Center.
This book offers a step-by-step procedure for developing rubrics for assess- ment of productive language skills. The approach to rubrics development is
applicable to CLIL contexts where language and content are to be assessed through students’ communicative performance.
Engagement Priorities
• Some teachers in Study 1 voiced their concerns about assessing the content of students’ presentations focusing on interestingness or originality. Do you think that teachers in your context might share similar concerns?
• One of our most important implications is making evaluation criteria for assessing content and language clear to students. In your context, what should be the balance of assessment criteria focusing on content and on language?
• One of the important purposes of assessment is to enhance students’ learn- ing by giving feedback on or raising awareness of their weaknesses. How do your students usually respond to your feedback strategies in a CLIL environment?
• In this study, performance-based assessments were preferred by the stu- dents. On the other hand, receptive skills still need to be assessed in CLIL as content can be learnt through reading and listening. What tasks can be included to assess the students’ receptive skills in CLIL courses?
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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 85 C. Hemmi, D. L. Banegas (eds.), International Perspectives on CLIL, International Perspectives on English Language Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70095-9_5